Fleeting Roots, Jonathan Tirado

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Onomichi, Japan carries a quiet crisis. Across its hillside arcades, akiya (abandoned properties) outnumber active storefronts, hollowing a town once defined by its dense, walkable culture. Fleeting Roots proposes a decentralized arts and fabrication campus woven through ten existing buildings along the Hondori Arcade, treating vacancy not as decay but as raw material for civic return.

The project rejects the museum impulse that often shadows preservation work. Heritage here is not frozen for tourist consumption. It is reactivated as a site of mutual cultural production, where local craft, visiting practice, and everyday commerce share the same vernacular shell. A precise …

Pertussis In Adolescents: Nonspecific Findings And The Importance Of Clinical Vigilance - A Single-Center Retrospective Study, Kaan Celebier, Furkan Kalayci, Merve Keser, Metin Yigit, Enes K. Kılıc, Yunus E. Ince, Ahmet A. Gungor, Hande Yigit, Betul Demircioglu Kalayci, Aslınur Özkaya Parlakay

Journal of Pediatric Infectious Diseases

Objective: In adolescents, pertussis commonly presents with a mild, atypical picture that can delay diagnosis, lead to its exclusion from the differential diagnosis list, and sustain community transmission. Typical paroxysms and laboratory abnormalities are frequently absent or subtle. We aimed to describe qPCR-confirmed adolescent cases and highlight diagnostic challenges. Methods: We retrospectively reviewed electronic records of patients presenting to general pediatrics and pediatric infectious diseases clinics between January 2019 and August 2025. Adolescents with a multiplex respiratory panel positive only for Bordetella pertussis were included; co-detections and incomplete data were excluded. Demographics, symptoms, examination and imaging findings, laboratory results, treatment, …

The Church As Provider Of Pastoral Care: Relational Presence, Narrative Listening, Preaching, And Advocacy In African American Missionary Baptist Churches In Southside Fort Worth, Texas, Michael R. Timberlake

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

Abstract

Michael R. Timberlake, Sr.

May 1, 2026

THE CHURCH AS PROVIDER OF PASTORAL CARE: RELATIONAL PRESENCE, NARRATIVE LISTENING, PREACHING, AND ADVOCACY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN MISSIONARY BAPTIST CHURCHES IN SOUTHSIDE FORT WORTH, TEXAS

The purpose of this research project is to restore and maintain the resiliency in the African American Missionary Baptist churches in the Southside of Fort Worth, Texas. The research identified a high level of importance for African American churches in Fort Worth to resemble the historic legacy of spiritual leadership, communal care, and social advocacy while ministering within contexts marked by racial and economic marginalization. Enabling practical …

A Vision For S.P.A.M. — Smart Planning For Accessibility In Micro-Communities, Alexis Myra Castillo Tamayo

Hospitality Design Graduate Student Capstones

The selection of a capstone topic is therefore deliberate. It requires engaging with issues that are not only architecturally relevant, but personally meaningful and socially significant. In this project, that focus returns to my hometown of Lāhainā, Maui—a place deeply rooted in history, culture, and community. In recent years, and especially following the events of 2023, the need to reconsider how design can support resilience, safety, and connection has become increasingly urgent. These conditions reveal that rebuilding is not solely about replacing what was lost, but about rethinking systems that shape everyday life. This capstone is grounded in that premise. …

Tracing The Mirage: Designing For The Unseen Community, Yasmine Bannoura

Hospitality Design Graduate Student Capstones

Tracing the Mirage: Designing for the Unseen Community explores how the temporary urbanism of Burning Man can inform more human-centered, experiential, and community-driven approaches to architecture and urban design in Las Vegas. Through research, interviews, surveys, and speculative gateway designs, the project reimagines arrival, identity, and connection within the desert landscape.

Volunteer Experiences In Outdoor Recreation: Navigating Uncertainty And Belonging, Morgan R. Purdy

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Volunteers play a central role in the operation of outdoor recreation areas, yet their positions often lack formal training, clear authority, and consistent structural guidance. While organizational socialization research has focused primarily on paid employees, less is known about how volunteers in outdoor contexts navigate uncertainty and develop identity through communication. Guided by organizational socialization theory and volunteer communication scholarship, this qualitative study examines two research questions: How do outdoor recreation volunteers manage uncertainty during socialization? And how does volunteering shape their sense of identity and belonging? Drawing on 13 semi-structured interviews and prolonged ethnographic fieldwork within a public land …

After The Final Whistle: Designing The Future Of Stadiums, Alan Zabdyel Garcia

Hospitality Design Graduate Student Capstones

After the Final Whistle: Designing the Future of Stadiums explores how the lifespan of aging and abandoned stadiums can be extended through adaptive reuse and community-centered design. As billions of dollars continue to be invested into sports infrastructure, many stadiums face obsolescence after only a few decades, often leaving behind urban voids and environmental waste. This design capstone develops a framework for evaluating stadium transformation through multiple lenses including adaptability, economics, urban planning, history, environmental impact, politics, sporting needs, and community engagement. Using case studies such as Sam Boyd Stadium and Cashman Field in Las Vegas, the research explores how …

(The) Invisible Threads: Portraiture, Memory, And Relational Endurance, Behnaz Ghasempour

Masters Theses, 2020-current

(The) Invisible Threads is an MFA thesis investigating how invisible interpersonal bonds, collective traces, and communal endurance can be made perceptible through drawing, material, and immersive installation. Drawing from my lived experience as an Iranian woman who has witnessed everyday constraint, collective uprising, and migration, the project asks how the presence of others continues to inhabit the body and shape identity even in conditions of separation and distance. Large-scale self-portraits, layered with other faces on transparent fabrics, copper plates, and stitched threads, position the artist’s own body as a site where personal and collective histories converge, allowing the self to …

Blight Pink: The Reclamation Of Vinegar Hill, Jalen J. Mickle

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Through critical analysis, speculative design, and spatial interventions, this project aims to reveal how the built environment and narrative structures co-produce the concept of “truth,” and how alternative practices can both challenge erasure and validate the Black American experience. Architecture, as a synthesis of form, identity, philosophy, and order, reflects and shapes societal hierarchies.

Care As Method: Sound, Duration, Relation In Contemporary Art Practice, Violet L. White

MFA in Visual Art

Abstract Care as Method: Sound, Duration, and Multispecies Relation in Contemporary Art Practice

This thesis proposes care as a method of artmaking, not a subject, theme, or aesthetic position, but the actual structural logic through which a body of work is built, sustained, and understood. Working at the intersection of ecological art practice and relational aesthetics, it asks what happens when the encounter at the center of the work is not between two people but between species, infrastructures, and histories of use and what obligations that encounter generates.

The argument is developed through six interconnected works: installations, sound compositions, sculptures, …

Local And Indigenous Knowledge, Innovation, And Sustainable Development: Creating Sustainable Futures Amidst Crisis Conditions At The Community Level, Carlos Andrés Arias

Dissertations and Theses

In 1987, the Brundtland Commission's Our Common Future (1987) made clear the need to reject longstanding development processes and focus on sustainable development. The Commission stressed that actual sustainable development integrates three elements: social development, economic development, and environmental protection. Though developed nations have achieved economic growth through conventional and extractive development practices, these practices have intensified natural disasters driven by climate change, increased food insecurity, and deepened poverty. This has acutely impacted Indigenous and local communities, many of whom face crisis conditions, such as war, terrorism, civil disorder, and their aftermath. Even so, many of these communities successfully implement …

2017u_Lac44_Approved_Soc-3381-Delete, Undergraduate Curriculum Council

All Approved Curriculum

No abstract provided.

2017u_Lac45_Approved_Soc-4273-Cr, Undergraduate Curriculum Council

All Approved Curriculum

No abstract provided.

2017g_Lac15_Approved_Soc-Grad-Course-Numbering-Rev-1, Graduate Council

All Approved Curriculum

No abstract provided.

2018u_Lac42_Approved_Bc_Crim-Soc-Description-Changes, Undergraduate Curriculum Council

All Approved Curriculum

No abstract provided.

2018u_Lac43_Approved_Cd_Geog-Soc-Deletions, Undergraduate Curriculum Council

All Approved Curriculum

No abstract provided.

2019u_Lac71_Approved_Bc_Soc-3333-3363-4333-Frequency-Changes, Undergraduate Curriculum Council

All Approved Curriculum

No abstract provided.

2019u_Lac70_Approved_Cd_Soc-4363-4373, Undergraduate Curriculum Council

All Approved Curriculum

No abstract provided.

Placemaking On Peachtree: Breathing Life In To Downtown Atlanta’S Outdoor Environment Through Wellbeing-Centric Design, Rachel Pickert

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Why do outdoor public spaces in Atlanta not prioritize pedestrian well-being by providing comfort, safety, and service to their daily life? The built environment is a key determinant of overall well-being through the opportunity for social interaction, stimulation, safety, comfort, and a sense of belonging. The vehicular-centric design of Downtown Atlanta has resulted in pedestrians seeking comfort away from the ground level using viaducts, subterrain transit, and sky bridges. This historic removal of pedestrians from the streets of Atlanta has resulted in un-activated outdoor public spaces which do not fulfill the basic needs for pedestrian wellbeing. This thesis uses existing …

Domestic Remix: Rethinking Home When Everything Happens Everywhere All At Once, Erika Louise Morales

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

With the cost of living rising, Americans are gravitating towards a living arrangement that may seem unconventional by local standards, but is common throughout the world: multigenerational households. This shift signals a growing openness to shared domesticity and a more collective way of living. Traditionally, Americans, like many Western cultures, are perceived to be more individualistic, whereas multigenerational living is often associated with more traditionally collectivist societies in the East. Yet, as social and economic pressures rise, Americans are reconsidering what “home” means to them, not only in terms of their individual space, but in terms of how their day …

Antidepressant Architecture, Joshua Landrum

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Both suburban sprawl and urban habitats continue to expand throughout the world, particularly in western civilization. With that expansion, the number of mental health issues have risen to an unprecedented level, leaving many individuals feeling isolated and depressed despite living in the most comfortable era of human history. This isolation is only escalated by the convenience of digital technology which allows us to get groceries, communicate with friends, and catch up on the latest news without ever having to leave our sealed domiciles or interacting with other people in a healthy and meaningful way. Through this self-destructive leisure, our connection …

The Social Art Of Architecture: Designing Adaptive Systems To Protect And Sustain Collective Resistance, Jadyn Dortch

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

This thesis explores the concept of protest architecture, focusing on how temporary, mobile, and tactical structures emerge within social movements to challenge systemic inequities and reclaim public space. Architecture has often been understood as permanent and institutional, yet protest reveals its capacity to be agile, symbolic, and activist. The project is motivated by the recognition that space is never neutral—it both reflects and produces relations of power. Influences include Teddy Cruz’s work on borderlands and architecture as civic infrastructure, Henri Lefebvre’s foundational theories of the production of space and the right to the city, and Angela Davis’s Black Studies scholarship …

2026 Utah Conference On Community Engagement Program, Utah State University, Erin Jensen

Utah Conference on Community Engagement

Conference Program

Interweaving Cairo's Urban Fabric: The Formal, The Informal And The Contemporary, Hagar Ahmed

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

Architecture is a negotiation between memory and change, preservation and erasure. In Cairo, a city layered with history, rapid development threatens historic areas and informal settlements (AlSayyad, 2011). While monumental heritage preservation is institutionalized, informal urban fabrics are often excluded from heritage discussions and planning. This research explores Mansheyet Nasser, or Garbage City, an informal settlement between Islamic Cairo and the Mokattam plateau. Over the past fifty years, Zabbaleen residents have built a communal waste collection and recycling system that processes up to 80% of materials, outperforming many regulated cities (Fahmi and Sutton, 2010; Didero, 2011). This infrastructure is both …

Contagious Rhetoric: The Generative Power And Malignant Erosion Of Rhetoric In Modern Media, Alexandra Russell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This dissertation develops a rhetorical framework for explaining how language circulates, shifts in meaning, and gains persuasive force in contemporary media environments. Existing models describe the movement of discourse but offer limited tools for analyzing how circulating narratives change—how affect, identity, and digital infrastructures shape that transformation. This project defines contagious rhetoric as a set of linguistic and narrative processes through which discourse becomes amplified, distorted, reclaimed, or weaponized. The studies examine two sites where these dynamics are especially visible: feminist digital storytelling in the #medusatattoo TikTok corpus and the strategic appropriation of abolitionist terminology by anti-abortion activists. These cases …

Resilience In Recreation: Stories Of A Changing Climate, Casey L. Auberle

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

As the impacts of climate change become increasingly prevalent, the outdoor activities that bond us to our local communities and environments are under threat. In Missoula, MT, drought, rising temperatures, and wildfire smoke change what it means to fish, ski, run, and recreate in our town. In a series of Q&A style podcasts, environmental philosophy graduate student Casey Auberle creates a platform to share stories of a changing climate through the lens of local recreators and climate activists. Capturing these voices invites us to consider our relationship with nature on both an individual and communal scale, to find unity in …

The Prospect Of F.E.W. Resources: How Food, Energy, And Waste Management Workforce Programs Address Global Equity And Sustainability, Quincy P. Biddle

Student Theses 2015-Present

As a global society, the issues affecting a specific city or country are no longer isolated; instead, they impact other places in myriad ways. Over the past few decades, environmental degradation and economic inequality, both within and between countries, have caused shortages of necessities like food and water, inadequate access to safe energy sources, and increased pollution, impacting people’s prosperity and the well-being of the planet. It is of global interest to remediate these issues for the betterment and progress of society, and thus, an approach to addressing these complications collectively and comprehensively is of utmost importance. This paper investigates …

Consulting For Chicagoland: Updating The Greenest Region Compact, Samantha Soria, Max Alexander, Ryan Regelbrugge

Honors Capstones

The Greenest Region Compact (GRC), created by the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus (MMC), is a regional sustainability framework used by over 176 local government signatories in the Chicagoland region, but was last updated nearly a decade ago. Students in this capstone project were tasked with proposing updates to a portion of the framework’s 49 goals, offering practical insights, new viewpoints, and integrating the Climate Action Plan for the Chicago Region (CAP). Students consulted municipal experts, identified relevant case studies, and gathered resources to support municipalities in applying the framework to their planning and operations. As part of their work, students enhanced …

Professional Portfolio: Becoming A Justice-Centered Practitioner, Akemi Nakagawa

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

This professional portfolio reflects my learning through this program, including the knowledge and skills I have developed, how my learning has been shaped by the people I have learned from and alongside, and what I will carry forward into future practice. I share my developing theoretical orientation that guides my thinking and practice, grounded predominantly in the Reproductive Justice framework, Critical Social Work, Janet Finn’s Just Practice framework, and by the work and wisdom of Paulo Freire–particularly his pedagogy of popular education.

This portfolio also reflects my ongoing development as a social worker who is committed to advancing intersectional justice …

Serological Evidence Of Onchocerca Volvulus Exposure And Entomological Indicators Of Parasite Transmission, Didier Kapuku Bakajika

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.