Digital Commons Network^™

Work Disengagement: Motivational Regulation Shaped By Psychological Need Frustration And Perceived Injustice, Stephanie R. Dailey

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Employee disengagement represents a persistent global challenge, yet remains theoretically underdeveloped and is frequently conflated with burnout, behavioral withdrawal, or deviance. Building on Kahn’s (1990) original conceptualization, this dissertation reconceptualizes disengagement as a distinct motivational state characterized by the withdrawal of cognitive, emotional, and physical energies from role performance. Drawing on Self Determination Theory (Ryan & Deci, 2000), Conservation of Resources theory (Hobfoll, 1989), and the Job Demands–Resources model (Bakker & Demerouti, 2007), I test a model where disengagement emerges as a motivational response to psychological need frustration, where organizational justice functions as an upstream contextual antecedent. Two complementary studies …

Theology Of Moosa’S Significance In The Quran From A Unique Perspective Of A Muslim Student In The United States, Kashif J. Farooqi

CGU Theses & Dissertations

As a Muslim studying Islam in the United States of America, I want my paper to focus on the holy book of Muslims, the Quran. Specifically, my focus will be to discuss the significance of Moosa or Moses in the Quran, with a theological perspective. I will answer the following question regarding Moosa in the Quran. Is the mention of Moosa in the Quran linked to the Jewish influence on Muhammad and if not, what is the reason of Moosa being mentioned so many times in the Quran? To answer the above question, I will explore two aspects of Moosa …

Shared Words, Divided Worlds: Moral Language And The Struggle For Meaning At The Claremont Colleges During The Vietnam War, 1965-1969, Haley Freeth

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This thesis examines the Vietnam War-era campus conflicts at the Claremont Colleges as a profound struggle over the meaning and ownership of moral and political language. Rather than interpreting antiwar and prowar activism as expressions of fundamentally opposed value systems, this study argues that students and administrators alike engaged in an ongoing contest to define ideals such as democracy, responsibility, and conscience. Through a micro-historical lens, the project analyzes how these contested vocabularies were invoked, reinterpreted, and performed in protests, counter-protests, and administrative policies. Drawing from a wide array of archival sources—including student newspapers, protest ephemera, administrative records, and visual …

The Epistemic Limits Of Evolutionary Debunking: An Evaluation Of Evolutionary Arguments Against Moral Realism, José Ernesto Guzmán

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Evolutionary debunking arguments contend that the evolutionary origins of moral belief undermine the epistemic standing of moral realism. Sharon Street's Darwinian Dilemma and Richard Joyce's genealogical undercutting argument represent the two most influential formulations of this challenge. This project subjects both to sustained internal critique and finds them wanting. The central contribution is a bridge-requirement framework identifying four principles (BR₁ through BR₄) that any evolutionary debunking argument must supply to move validly from genealogical premises to epistemic conclusions. BR₁ connects genealogy to justification. BR₂ connects population-level evolutionary explanations to individual-level epistemic consequences. BR₃ connects semantic features of moral discourse to …

Beyond Access: Black Women Alumnae’S Perspectives On Navigating Russell Group Universities As Undergraduates In The United Kingdom, Varaidzo Felistus Kativhu

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This qualitative study examines the lived experiences of Black British women who attended Russell Group universities, investigating how they navigated identity, belonging, racism, and institutional support within elite higher education. The study was guided by three research questions: how Black women experienced identity and belonging in these environments; what survival and resistance strategies they developed in response; and what institutional changes they recommend to better support Black women students. Drawing on Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 2000), Strayhorn’s (2018) sense of belonging framework, and Tuck’s (2009) desire-based research framework, the study employed a phenomenological methodology adapted from Seidman (2019). The research …

Prevention Beyond Deterrence, Benjamin A. Barsky

Emory Law Journal

This Article reconceptualizes preventive justice—the public safety paradigm that seeks to prevent harm before it occurs. Scholars have long documented how cities have advanced this paradigm through largely punitive measures, notably variants of broken windows policing, which posit that aggressive misdemeanor enforcement deters more serious crime. Yet in the aftermath of the 2020 George Floyd protests, and as underscored recently in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, these measures have faced a legitimacy crisis—prompting calls for nonpunitive responses to nonviolent incidents.

This Article establishes a preventive justice approach that advances health and safety without emphasizing crime deterrence. It draws …

Lunch Shaming And The Right To Privacy, Ira P. Robbins

Emory Law Journal

Lunch shaming is the practice of penalizing students who cannot afford to pay for their meals, resulting in them being denied food, served alternative meals, or publicly identified. The origins of lunch shaming can be traced to the financial pressures faced by school districts that struggle to balance tight budgets with the mandate to provide free or reduced-price meals to eligible students. Despite legislative efforts and advocacy campaigns aimed at mitigating the problems associated with lunch shaming, the practice persists, exacerbated by rising food costs and the expiration of pandemic-era food programs.

Many law journal and other articles have correctly …

Process Failures, Unremedied Harms, And Students With Disabilities, Claire Raj

Emory Law Journal

Although the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (“IDEA”) has long aimed to extend what it calls a “free appropriate public education” to all students with disabilities, one demographic group—students from lower-income homes—has consistently been left behind. Securing a remedy under the IDEA’s highly technical rules and impermeable evidentiary standards increasingly requires the assistance of both lawyers and experts, neither of whom are easily accessible to lower-income families. This inaccessibility subverts Congress’s original intent. Congress infused the IDEA with robust procedures to ensure two equally important substantive ends. First, procedures were meant to ensure meaningful parent participation and provide parents with …

The Evolution Of Trust And Safety, Danielle Keats Citron, Ari Ezra Waldman

Emory Law Journal

This Article tells the inside story of the rise, spread, and evolution of trust and safety. We bring unique perspectives to this story. One of us (Citron) was on the inside, advising many tech companies over the years on how to create healthy digital environments. The other (Waldman) was on the outside, observing, through field research, how tech companies respond to and translate law into their routines, organizational structures, and practices. Together, these perspectives offer scholars and policymakers unmatched opportunities not just to see what is happening but to understand it as well. For decades, U.S. tech companies resisted legal …

The Effects Of The Opioid Crisis On Contraceptive Decisions And Fertility In Pakistan, Simren R. Khan

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper examines how the opioid epidemic influences household fertility behavior in Pakistan by analyzing contraceptive use and fertility outcomes across regions with differing levels of opioid prevalence. Using household-level data from the 2017–18 Pakistan Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) and estimating OLS regression models, the study compares households in high-prevalence regions with those in low-prevalence regions. The results show that exposure to high-opioid regions is associated with lower fertility outcomes and a higher likelihood of respondents wanting their last child. These patterns suggest that households may respond to opioid-related economic and caregiving burdens by limiting family size and treating …

Why We Can’T “Get Over It”: Offense And The Moral Limits Of Epistocracy, Yui Kurosawa

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines whether an epistocracy — rule of the knowledgeable — could ever be implemented as a morally permissible alternative to democracy. Building on Jason Brennan’s instrumental critique of democracy in Against Democracy, I lay out his argument that systematic voter ignorance undermines the epistemic capacity of “one person, one vote” to reliably generate just and well-informed political decisions. Brennan argues that epistocratic institutions, which allocate political power according to political competence rather than by equal distribution, are better positioned to achieve such decisions and therefore more legitimate than democracy.

Epistocracy, as an aspirational alternative, may indeed be promising; …

Has Liberalism Failed? Analyzing The New Right’S Critique Of Liberalism Through Its Historical Arc, Frederick (Gus) G. Mahler

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the historical evolution of American political culture to evaluate whether liberalism is responsible for the social and political crises confronting the United States today. Although liberalism has been foundational to American governance and national identity since the country’s inception, a growing movement known broadly as the New Right now claims that it has failed and must be replaced. I seek to assess the legitimacy of this claim.

Using qualitative historical analysis, I trace how the form liberalism takes and the role it occupies in America’s political order has changed throughout the nation’s development. Liberalism was not always …

From Reconstruction To The Carceral State: Law, Labor, And Punishment In Black America, Nicolas S. Changbencharoen

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the reconfiguration of racial and labor subordination in the United States from Reconstruction to the present, arguing that the legal abolition of slavery did not dismantle the economic and institutional structures on which it rested. It traces a continuous trajectory through which law and the criminal justice system were systematically weaponized to reconstitute slavery's essential functions under successive institutional forms, each serving as a deliberate mechanism for the extraction of Black labor in service of private and state interests. The analysis culminates in an examination of the modern carceral state, concluding that contemporary prison labor programs continue …

School Reopenings And Adhd Medication Utilization: Evidence From Covid-19 Policy Variation, Madeline C. Levey

CMC Senior Theses

This paper investigates how variation in K–12 school reopening policies across U.S. states during the COVID-19 pandemic affected Medicaid-covered ADHD stimulant medication prescriptions. Using an event study and difference-in-differences framework with state and time fixed effects, I exploit variation in the timing and mode of school reopening across states from 2017 to 2022. School reopening data are drawn from a national district-level panel tracking the share of students attending school in-person, hybrid, or virtually; prescription outcomes are from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services State Drug Utilization Data. The event study reveals a sharp decline in ADHD prescriptions at …

Platform Polarization?, Matthew B. Lawrence

Emory Law Journal

This Essay explores what the ongoing politicization of Americans’ relationships to and through the technologies they use to interact online might come to mean for the workings of American government and for the constitutional law questions—especially First Amendment and separation-of-power questions—that depend on those workings. James Madison described the workings of government as a function of the interaction of human nature, law, and social movements (factions). From local newspapers to national magazines to radio to broadcast TV to cable news, experience has taught that a fourth variable—the communications technology through which people interact—is also critically important. In the recent era, …

Justice For One, Injustice For All: The Consequences Of The Legal Services Corporation’S Class Action Restriction, Elizabeth J. Lattner

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Google’S Sauna Hour: Reverse Keyword Searches And The Fourth Amendment, Matthew Matolka

Case Western Reserve Law Review

No abstract provided.

Meteorological And Air Quality Effects On Bioaerosol Detection Using Wibs-Neo And Ibac-2 In Dublin City, Emma Markey, Jerry Hourihane Clancy, Moisés Martínez-Bracero, José María Maya-Manzano, Raúl Pecero-Casimiro, Eoin Joseph Mcgillicuddy, Gavin Sewell, Roland Sarda-Estève, Andrés M. Vélez-Pereira, David J. O’Connor

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

This study evaluates the performance of two real-time fluorescence-based bioaerosol sensors, the WIBS-NEO and IBAC-2, operating in urban Dublin, Ireland, and assesses the influence of different meteorological and pollution parameters on their outputs. This was done by comparing particle sensor data to meteorological variables and air quality metrics. Over the 41-day campaign, Urticaceae pollen and Cladosporium spores were the dominant bioaerosols recorded, comprising 78% and 66% of total pollen and fungal spore concentrations, respectively. Correlation analyses revealed several significant variables: fluorescent BC-type particles (>8 μm) detected by WIBS-NEO strongly correlated with pollen concentrations (r = 0.84 after excluding high-wind …

Code-Net++: An Attention-Guided Deep Learning Framework With Grad-Cam-Based Explainability For Covid-19 Detection Using Chest X-Ray Images, Fareesa Amina, Dr Krishnanaik Vankdoth

Mansoura Engineering Journal

Chest radiograph imaging has emerged as a practical and scalable diagnostic modality for respiratory diseases, including COVID-19. However, accurate discrimination of COVID-19 manifestations from other pulmonary abnormalities remains challenging because of low contrast, imaging noise, and overlapping radiographic patterns. This work presents CODE-NET++, an enhanced attention-guided deep learning framework with Grad-CAM-based explainability for reliable COVID-19 detection using chest X-ray images. The proposed framework integrates adaptive trilateral filtering for image enhancement, Reverse Edge Attention Network (RE-Net) for lesion-aware segmentation, and an Enhanced LinkNet architecture with dilated convolutions for multiscale feature extraction and classification. Grad-CAM-based explainable artificial intelligence visualization is incorporated to …

The Effect Of Second-Order Slip In Hydromagnetic Eyring-Powell Flow: A Bvp4c Study, Ch. Maheswari, B. Naga Lakshmi, G. Dharmaiah, R. Mohana Ramana, B. Reddappa

Mansoura Engineering Journal

The steady-state Eyring–Powell boundary layer fluid flow past a moving surface is examined, considering various parameter implications. These include the wall mass transfer parameter (0.5  C   2.0), the magnetic field parameter (5  Mn 20), the velocity ratio parameter (0.1  λ1  0.7), Eyring-Powell fluid parameters (0.5 K 2 & 0.1 E 0.4), as well as the first-order velocity slip (0.1 γ 1.1) and second-order velocity slip (0.1 δ  0.4). By employing appropriate similarity transformations, the PDEs are reduced to a set of non-linear ODEs, which are subsequently solved using the bvp4c numerical technique and, an implication of key factors on shear …

University Of Central Florida Graduate Catalog, 2025-2026, University Of Central Florida

UCF Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Red-Sensitive Photopolymerizable Glass For Fabrication Of Holographic Optical Elements, Jamshed Aftab, Izabela Naydenova, Tatsiana Mikulchyk

Research Outputs: 2025-Present

Water-resistant photopolymerizable glass, which represents a photopolymerizable hybrid sol–gel (PHSG) material, has emerged as a compelling platform for holographic optical elements fabrication (HOEs), owing to its exceptional mechanical and thermal robustness with high holographic recording performance. Until now, PHSG compositions have been limited to blue/green-sensitive systems, despite significant interest in extending sensitivity into the red spectral region. Here, we report the first holographic photopolymerizable glass with sensitivity to red light, achieved through the incorporation of methylene blue (MB) as a photosensitizer and N-phenylglycine (NPG) as a co-initiator, with an optimal MB/NPG ratio of 1:150. This PHSG composition is capable of …

Ai-Supported Socratic Questioning And Instructional Scaffolding: Effects On Student Comprehension, Reshma John

All Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This literature review examines how the intentional use of artificial intelligence (AI) designed for Socratic questioning and instructional scaffolding affects students' comprehension of course content. The literature suggests that AI is most likely to support comprehension when it prompts students to explain their reasoning, respond to guided questions, reflect on their understanding, and receive support adapted to their needs. In contrast, systems that primarily provide direct answers may encourage overreliance and mask gaps in students' understanding. Overall, the educational value of AI depends less on its availability and more on how it is designed and implemented.

An Engine, Not A Vessel: Place, Politics, And Health In The United States, Philip B. Rocco

Political Science Faculty Research and Publications

Social scientists often treat places as containers for social and economic phenomena that shape health outcomes. Yet this analytic practice conceals more than it reveals. Local governments in the United States should be understood as engines of both health promotion and stratification. As the contributions to this symposium suggest, governments not only occupy a formal place in the U.S. public health system, their decisions on everything from housing to transportation infrastructure can also have profound impacts on health outcomes. Local political economies likewise renegotiate the parameters of acceptable health interventions, public understandings of health disparities, and the status of population …

Good Girl Bootcamp: Performative Femininity, Purity Culture, And Other Things Girls Are Taught, Kiersten Holland

Masters Theses

Performative femininity is a dangerous and controlling idea that subjugates women and places their inherent worth on how well they can conform to societal standards in male dominated spaces. Consequently, the reactionary messaging that surfaced as a result of these social pressures created a series of stereotypical female characterizations often depicted in the material and visual cultures of each period. By comparing contemporary literature with literature from the Victorian time period, it emphasizes the longstanding and controlling gender stereotypes pervasive throughout the past few centuries. This thesis attempts to understand and analyze the way that literature both critiques and supports …

From Glass Ceilings To Balustrades: The Barriers And Supports In Gender-Balanced Corporate Boards Through The Lens Of Activity Theory, Erica Joy Thompson Dias

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this qualitative study was to examine, through the lens of activity theory (AT), barriers individuals on public company boards of directors experienced in achieving or maintaining gender balance and supports that mitigated those barriers.

Methodology: Data were collected through semistructured interviews with 16 directors representing 13 gender-balanced public company boards. Data were coded using the AT framework, which conceptualizes human activity through interacting components including subject, object, rules, tools, community, and division of labor. In this study, barriers were tensions that obstructed progress toward gender balance, and supports were methods, resources, or actions that mitigated those …

How Political Intelligence Sets Exemplary Mid-Level Military Women Leaders Apart, Rita Y. Ovette

Dissertations

ABSTRACT How Political Intelligence Sets Exemplary Mid-level Military Women Leaders Apart by Rita Yvette Ovete Purpose: The purpose of this exploratory phenomenological study was to identify and describe the political intelligence strategies that mid-level military women use as they respond to leadership challenges based on Reffo and Wark’s (2014) five facets of political intelligence (futurity, power, empathy with purpose, trust, and versatility). A secondary purpose of the study was to explore how mid-level military women explain their use of political intelligence strategies to support their career success and tenure while navigating leadership challenges. Methodology: This phenomenological study explored the lived …

Walking On A Tightrope: Women And Managers Navigating Maternity Leave And Return-To-Work, Rachel R. Kalvert

Dissertations

Purpose: This qualitative phenomenological study explored how professional women experience maternity leave and return-to-work, focusing on how managerial communication shapes perceptions of career, competence, belonging, and career progression. The study involved professional women who returned to the same organization full-time from 6 months to 3 years after maternity leave.Methodology: Fourteen professional women were recruited via snowball sampling and listservs. Data were collected through Zoom interviews. Participants completed a demographic questionnaire and received interview questions in advance. The interview guide aligned with the study's three questions. After the interview, participants reviewed AI-generated transcript summaries for accuracy; and participants were given a …

An Explanatory Mixed-Methods Study Identifying And Describing The Perceived Impact Of Five Disruptive Career Skills On Women’S Career Advancement To An Executive Leadership, Roque Ramirez

Dissertations

Purpose: The purpose of this explanatory mixed-methods study was to identify and describe the perceived impact of Johnson and Mohr’s (2019) five disruptive career skills on the career advancement of female chief petty officers with a military background as they progressed into a leadership position.Methodology: This explanatory mixed-methods study examined the experienced of eight female chief petty officers regarding the use of personal disruption strategies. Participants were selected through purposive sampling based on predetermined eligibility criteria and recommendations. Data were collected and analyzed by calculating means scores for quantitative responses and identifying qualitative themes related to the five personal disruption …

Structural And Biochemical Insights Into Phospholipase D Function And Its Small Gtpase Stimulators, Douglas Jay Marr

Electronic Dissertations and Theses, 2010-current

Phospholipase D1 (PLD1) and D2 (PLD2) are lipid metabolizing enzymes that produce phosphatidic acid and contribute to pathologies such as cancer, neurodegeneration, and cardiovascular diseases. Recently, the ARF-like GTPase 11 (ARL11) was identified as an activator of PLD1, but the mechanism of this stimulation remained unknown. Here, we use in vitro biochemical assays and structural predictions to determine that ARL11 interacts with PLD1 using three adjacent, biochemically distinct interfaces, and that the ends of PLD1’s disordered loop form ordered structures to facilitate these interactions. Both PLD1 and PLD2 are peripheral membrane proteins that have differing subcellular localization important for their …