Digital Commons Network^™

Tra And Small Business Will The Benefits Outweigh The Costs?, Debra M. (White) Hopkins, Arthur Cassill

Tax Adviser

No abstract provided.

Gender Affirming Rhetoric, Emerson R. Wright

Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice

During the runup to the 2024 election, virtually every person who watched an American football game saw an advertisement alleging that Kamala Harris was “for they/them,” while “President Trump is for you.” Candidates and interest groups spent more than $200 million on ads shaping and preying on public perception of trans people, and Democrats wasted no time blaming Kamala Harris’s electoral loss on messaging around trans issues. On the heels of a contentious election that relied heavily on this type of weaponized culture war messaging, misleading and hostile discourse about transgender people and the issues they face is hard to …

Disenfranchisement, S.B. 8005, And The Price Of Protest In Tennessee, Valorie K. Vojdik

Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Read The Writing On The Wall: Why Confederate Messaging Matters In Tennessee Courthouses, Hon. John G. Browning

Tennessee Journal of Race, Gender, & Social Justice

No abstract provided.

Markovian Communication Protocol For Efficient Communication In Distributed Systems, Shivam Mohan

Defensive Publications Series

ABSTRACT

The proposed protocol introduces a Markovian approach to message propagation in distributed computing systems, emphasizing reduced overhead and enhanced fault tolerance. Each node functions as a stateless agent, making forwarding decisions solely based on its current state and the received message, consistent with the Markov property. Messages act as self-contained carriers, embedding relay history and path metadata such as bloom filters, vector clocks, or acknowledgment maps, so nodes can detect prior processing and avoid redundant forwarding. Current-state directives like next-hop details, time-to-live, quorum requirements, and propagation mode guide deterministic or probabilistic dissemination across gossip, ring, or hybrid topologies. By …

A Training Needs Analysis For A Sustainable Tourism Destination Management Programme: A Practitioner’S Perspective, Catriona Murphy Dr., Shane O'Sullivan, Nicola Orio, Ilaria Doimo

Irish Journal of Tourism, Hospitality, Leisure and Event Research

While sustainable tourism practices have long been acknowledged for their potential to reduce negative impacts and enhance positive outcomes, their effectiveness is often hindered by several challenges. These include a considerable gap in skills and inadequate collaboration between practitioners and educators. To meet these pressing challenges, it is essential to strengthen awareness, enhance collaboration between industry and educators, and develop the critical skills needed to champion responsible and sustainable tourism in European regions. As the principles of sustainability advocate for equitable management of tourism destinations combined with the upward growth in tourism activity in Europe post pandemic, there is an …

Rethinking Luxury In Tourism: Slow Travel, Signature Experiences, Alternative Accommodation And Policy Interaction In The Irish And Eu Context, Maria E. Murphy, James Hanrahan Dr, John Carty

Irish Journal of Tourism, Hospitality, Leisure and Event Research

Over the past number of years, luxury tourism is changing as sustainability concerns, shifting consumer values, and new policy frameworks challenge older ideas of extravagance and exclusivity. This paper explores how modern luxury tourism is being shaped by slow travel, meaningful experiences, and stronger connections with local communities, focusing on Ireland and the wider European Union. Using an action-research approach, the study is based on the creation and running of Within the Village, a village-based luxury tourism accommodation in the west of Ireland, founded on the principles of the Italian Albergo Diffuso (scattered hotel) sustainable model. Through repeated cycles of …

Reflections Of An Appalachian Miner's Grandson: How The Biden Administration Prioritized Miners' Safety And Health And Mining Communities, Christopher J. Williamson

West Virginia Law Review Online

No abstract provided.

Material Costs, Karima Weinman

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how migration fatality and disappearance data can be reinterpreted through material craft to create a more reflective encounter with information. Working with the Missing Migrants Project's dataset, this project asks how design can communicate dimensions of human loss that conventional data visualization cannot reach.

The work situates contemporary border violence within a longer colonial history, arguing that the logics of surveillance and quantification that structured European imperial expansion persist in the databases that govern mobility in the Mediterranean today.

Terrazzo is a 15th-century Venetian flooring technique built from discarded fragments bound together into a unified surface. This …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Rules Of Origin And U.S. Tariffs On Imported Electric Vehicles: What Makes A Car Chinese?, Carlos F. Aguirre Cardenas

Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law

This article analyzes the legal and regulatory foundations of the U.S. Government's decision to impose unilateral tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles, including the 100 percent tariff enacted under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the 25 percent tariff established under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962. It focuses on how rules of origin influence the effectiveness of these measures and examines how Chinese electric vehicle manufacturers might design supply chain strategies to circumvent tariffs by classifying vehicles as non-Chinese.

I Miss My Computer: Online Artistry, Web Aesthetics, And Coming-Of-Age In A Digital Landscape, Catherine Capeci

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how young artists develop their creative practices in a world informed by digitality. Through survey research of 44 art students between the ages of 14 and 22, as well as a process of autoethnographic inquiry, I examine how artists in high school and college relate to digital imagery, web archives, online gaming, and social media platforms, and how these experiences inform artmaking. I believe that art educators should explore how the internet informs aesthetic and conceptual sensibilities, and how these sensibilities show up in young artists’ work, more so than focus on digital media as its own …

"Hand And Mind Lead To Life": Craft Pedagogy In Art Education For Older Adolescent Learners, Katherine Fu

Masters Theses

Art educator Jo-Anna Moore (1991) asks “What is the purpose of our individual growth through art or craft?” (p. 162). Moore’s question is daunting not least for the seasoned artist, but for the young people in our art classrooms who, to varying degrees, are or are not interested in art. This thesis draws from my personal narrative as an older adolescent whose introduction to craft helped me navigate great questions of identity, belonging, and motivation. It seeks to discover how craft can become a method of teaching art to all students, and in particular, how such a pedagogy addresses the …

Jadughar: The House Of Magic, Dhruvi A. Shah

Masters Theses

Jadughar or the House of Magic is what people call a 'museum' in parts of South Asia. The practice of museum making, at its origin, is the act of collecting, preserving, interpreting and representing a culture’s tangible and intangible heritage to make it accessible to diverse audiences. Since the early 19th century such practices have been performed at various kala bhandars (art centers) in India, without the need of a formal or institutional organisation. The British introduced the model of a ‘museum’ in South Asia, with the aim of not only preserving ethnographic collections, but also showcasing their power and …

Fetishismus:Facism, Sodomy, And The Exhibition, Matthew P. Gershovich

Masters Theses

Fetishismus examines the contemporary dislocation between homosexuality and queerness. Homosexuality is the biological, innate quality of same-sex attraction. Queerness is rooted in deviance, perversion, and sociologically attached to the “other.” Although almost always used in an explicitly homosexual connotation, “queerness” is not entirely contingent on the physical engagement of homosexual acts. In historical usage, queer is used as a pejorative adjective, implying a lack of masculinity with the intent to invoke repulsion. In contemporary parlance the two are treated as synonymous. This intertwined relationship relies on the forced lack of social and spatial belonging that is rooted in a foundational …

Returning To The Hand, Tatum Dodd

Masters Theses

Historical preservation is traditionally understood as the act of protecting objects and buildings from change, reinstating and stabilizing the past so they may endure into the future. When preservation seeks to freeze and resolve the past, it separates it from the reality of our multi-layered histories and the traces of labor, repair, and care unfolding across generations. Through a human-centered lens that allows one to touch, uncover, and redefine, we are able to relate to our built environments through an ethical practice of care, inviting new avenues of dialogue and engagement with our past.

Recording traces of the hand within …

Looking In All Directions, Abby Sunde

Masters Theses

“Looking in All Directions” mobilizes attention towards the concepts of ‘desettling’ through art and ‘desettling’ as a way of being. Desettling constitutes resistance, resilience, survivance, and refusal of current Western modalities within our society. This body of work is a material exploration of these worldviews to find potential ways to embody a practice that aligns ourselves outside of a colonial settler mindset while living within its societal condition. Using glass, sound, and installation work, the artist un-centers expected encounters with an inherited dominant worldview and instead offers an actualized shift in awareness. Concepts of interconnectedness, interwoven time, and embodied memories …

“The Duty Of Hatred”: Anti Germanism In Ohio During Wwi, Quinn Edward Hall

History Undergraduate Senior Theses

During the First World War Ohio was engulfed in an environment of anti-Germanism. In an effort to mobilize the public for war, the federal and Ohio state governments labeled German-Americans and Germanness as an existential domestic threat. It was thus framed that policing the loyalty of German-Americans and riding the state of its German character were essential wartime duties. This ideology led Ohioans to eliminate German language from schools, purge the state of German culture, engage in mob violence against their German American neighbors, and successfully utilize anti-Germanism to enact statewide prohibition. While other historians have suggested that this anti-Germanism …

“I Have A Voice”: Bridging The Communication And Sensemaking Gap Between Restorative Justice Practice And Program Implementation, Stefan Cocorelis

Dissertations

Restorative justice (RJ), a philosophy, practice, and movement inspired by local, largely Indigenous traditions, has increasingly been introduced in modern criminal justice systems as an alternative process to more comprehensively address harmful incidents, heal harms, and meet victim’s needs. While RJ implementation growth is encouraging for its advocates, there remain significant questions around formalized RJ practice. Specifically, little is known about the decision-making process in implementing and administering RJ programming within criminal justice. This dissertation aimed to contribute to the understanding of RJ practice and implementation efforts within criminal justice systems by putting emphasis on practitioners already working directly in …

Beyond The Tampon (Menstrual Equity & Justice Certification), Rucha Kale

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that while menstruation is a common life event, experiences related to menstruation are not inherently inequitable for a range of reasons that relate to wider currents that revolve around a narrow idea of the “default” human body. One imagined as non-menstruating, uninterrupted in its activities, or endowed with social, economic, and political agency. This project asks what becomes possible when those usually excluded from this norm are no longer treated as exceptions to accommodate, but as core and central constituencies to design with and for.

Using menstruation as a critical site of inquiry, the thesis first examines …

International Law Situations: Blockade, Raul (Pete) Pedrozo

International Law Studies

This Situation examines the right of belligerents to establish and enforce a blockade and the right to conduct visit and search of enemy and neutral merchant ships globally outside neutral waters.

Dead Reckoning, Jeremy A. Grail

Masters Theses

For over a century, conceptual, social, and legal frameworks have governed human relationships with technology by dematerializing data and personal information. From the early twentieth century, when human speech was converted into electrical pulses through telephone wires, to today’s pressure to integrate sensing, computation, and automation into every facet of contemporary life, electronic communications have become increasingly detached from the body and systematically defined as a weightless, immaterial asset.

This thesis refutes the industry-led myth of the “immaterial cloud” by revealing the presence and transmission of data to be a series of physical, tectonic, and spatial events that are woven …

Snail-Shell-Derived Biochar For The Adsorption Of Petroleum Pollutants From Wastewater: Perspective From Computational Studies, Hitler Louis, Theresa O. Egbuchunam, Idongesit J. Mbonu

Polytechnic Journal

Para-chlorophenols (PCPs) are toxic and persistent, chlorinated aromatics that are prevalent in industrial and petroleum-contaminated wastewater, which has serious environmental and health impacts because of their bioaccumulative and recalcitrant properties. The study aims to design and test chemically activated snail shell biochars (SSB) as an effective PCP remedial material, combining the molecular understanding of the material with the predictions of adsorption efficacy. To study both electronic, structural, and dynamic interactions of PCP with a series of biochar analogs (KOH@SSB, H₂SO₄@SSB, AMS@SSB, Mg@SSB, Zn@SSB), both Density Functional Theory (DFT) calculations and Monte Carlo (MC) simulations were used. …

Playing Into Confidence: A Literature Review, Zoë J. Crowe

Expressive Therapies Theses

This integrative literature review examines the relationship between drama therapy and self-efficacy, and its implications for academic success. Traditional measures of achievement emphasize outcomes while overlooking the psychological processes that influence student engagement and persistence. Drawing on interdisciplinary literature, this review synthesizes research on how drama therapy supports self-efficacy through embodiment, role exploration, and structured play. These processes create safe, participatory environments where individuals can rehearse new behaviors and reconstruct self-perceptions. They also align with key mechanisms of self-efficacy development, including mastery experiences and emotional regulation. This review identifies gaps in current research, particularly the limited integration of drama therapy …

A Psycho-Spiritual Transformation In Covid-19 Crisis Narratives: A Comparative Study In Indonesia And Pakistan, Heru Prakosa, Nurlaela Widyarini, Johanes Seno Aditya Utama, Juan Carlos

Makara Human Behavior Studies in Asia

Although the COVID-19 pandemic ended as a global health emergency, its psychosocial legacy persists in many communities. This study examines how religion and spirituality support recovery in Indonesia and Pakistan by shaping crisis narratives. Faith-based language is treated as psychosocial data and interpreted through its functions in meaning-making, emotion regulation, social connection, value anchoring, and action commitment using Psycho-Spiritual Transformation (PST) as a guiding framework. Open-ended responses were collected from 274 participants via an online survey in July 2021 (Indonesia n = 236; Pakistan n = 38). Across both contexts, narratives typically moved from pressure and inner conflict toward spiritual …

Generative Ai And Student Engagement, Motivation, And Learning: Exploring The Use Of Generative Ai In Higher Education Online Courses, Jeffrey L. Simmons

Dissertations

ABSTRACT

The rapid emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT in higher education has left many institutions unprepared to assess their potential benefits and risks. This mixed-methods study examined how ChatGPT and Google’s NotebookLM were integrated into online course development and delivery at a small private nonprofit university in California, and assessed their perceived impact on student engagement, motivation, and learning.

Data were collected from post-course Likert-scale surveys completed by students across three online master’s-level courses and from pre-course prediction surveys by instructors in the two NotebookLM courses. Quantitative analyses included one-sample t-tests against a …

Embodied Leadership And Conditional Legitimacy: Critically Conscious Male Leaders Navigating Systems Of Power, Luis A. Legaspi

Dissertations

Leadership is not a neutral concept; it is shaped by overlapping systems of power, including empire, whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. These interlocking systems influence how leadership is defined, recognized, and legitimized, often privileging particular identities and forms of authority. The persistent underrepresentation of people of color, women, and queer individuals in positions of leadership reflects how dominant conceptions of leadership remain closely aligned with historically entrenched structures of power.

This critical narrative inquiry study examines how men, who disproportionately occupy positions of social and institutional authority, make meaning of masculinity, power, and leadership within these systems. Drawing on relational …

Burning Out: A Narrative Exploration Of The Adaptive Challenge And Scaffolds Built Toward Sustenance Among Immigrant Rights Activists In San Diego County, Anna C. Runion

Dissertations

Activist burnout has been identified as one of the greatest threats to social movement sustainability, and the lived experience of paid immigrant rights activists remains undertheorized. This narrative inquiry explored activist burnout among 10 San Diego County immigrant rights activists, revealing how this community understands burnout, what factors contribute to its production, and how activists sustain themselves within it. Using Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) narrative inquiry methodology, the researcher conducted in-depth individual interviews with ten activists representing a range of intersectional identities and roles. Narrative profiles were analyzed through holistic narrative reading, narrative reporting, structural and emergent coding, and cross-narrative …

A Praxis Of Transformative Care: Centering Historically Resilient Students At A Pwi, Tanaisha Coleman

Dissertations

Campus cultural centers frequently treat student resilience as an individual struggle rather than a collective responsibility, obscuring systemic failures. At a predominantly white institution (PWI), historically resilient students, those from diverse backgrounds who have historically endured the structural load of institutional exclusion, carry the compounded weight of navigating systemic barriers while driving institutional change. This qualitative study disrupts traditional narratives of surviving and thriving to examine how undergraduate students constituting a student advisory committee (SAC) coconstructed critical resilience rooted in transformative and collective care.

Using community-based participatory research (CBPR), this study positions students as coarchitects of their institutional experiences. Over …

The Ever-Changing Immigration Experience: An Oral History On The Impacts Of Immigration For Connecticut Latine Residents / Una Experiencia En Cambio Constante: Una Historia Oral De Los Impactos De La Inmigración Por Habitantes Latines En Connecticut, Sam S. Arevalo-Hoefer

Honors Scholar Theses

This paper is an oral history study focused on Latine immigration experiences in Connecticut from six different individuals sharing their stories and perspectives on the immigration process. I focus on the act of testimony as a source of grassroots knowledge and attempt to spread this notion of community wisdom further through the creation of zines (small-batch, self-published, non-commercial shortform magazines) as a means of making information more accessible and reaching a larger audience on a local level.

I use oral histories as a method of research that can achieve a deeper, more human understanding of how macro level political decisions …