Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Manifestation Of Biblical Community Understanding In A Facebook Community: A Qualitative Study Among Christian College Students, Paul Perkins

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Applying theoretical studies of social capital, social presence, cognitive presence, and community helps researchers understand more fully the phenomenon of online social networks. The debate has moved from the positive and negative effects of online social networks to understanding how they fit into daily life. However, do biblical community beliefs transfer to Facebook? If Facebook is considered a community, does it exhibit the characteristics of a biblical community? Through a qualitative case study design, this research explored eight Christian college students, four men and four women, from two Midwest Christian colleges, investigating their understanding of biblical community and its application …

A Lone Nut In Compton:Lessons In Community Engagement With Treepeople In South Los Angeles, Jason Schlatter

Capstone Collection

The following study was conducted as an exploration of the community engagement practices of the Los Angeles based nonprofit organization, TreePeople. The intention of this study was to foster a deeper understanding about the theories and practice of the “outsider” TreePeople’s community engagement initiatives in the region of South Los Angeles, with particular emphasis on the communities of Compton, Inglewood, and historic South Central. I attempted to synthesize a collective narrative about the way TreePeople interacts with its constituents and community partners by drawing upon the experiences and perceptions of TreePeople staff, community partners, and community members. The individual experiences …

Metta, Richard C. Crepeau

On Sport and Society

Maybe I missed the memo. Perhaps I wasn’t paying close enough attention. Or somehow it wasn’t big enough news in London. Whatever the case may be, I was a startled when I read recently that someone named Metta World Peace was playing basketball in the NBA for the Los Angeles Lakers. I remember World B. Free of the NBA and He Hate Me of the XFL, but Metta World Peace was a new one.

Ua12/2/1 Best Of The Hill, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Special awards edition of the College Heights Herald.

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald - Graduation, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

Special commencement edition of the College Heights Herald.

• Kimura, Alex. Not Knowing Your Future Isn’t So Bad – Student Government Association
• Honor College Graduates
• Congratulations Biology Graduates!
• Jury, Tyler. Find Something You are Passionate About & Pursue It with Diligence – Spirit Masters
• Wittenborn, Ashley. Gain as Much Experience as You Can Soak Up Every Moment - Talisman
• Johnson, Jasmine. Basketball Has Shaped My Life Probably More Than Anything Else Besides God
• Congratulations Graduates from the Management Department
• College of Health & Human Services Graduates
• Nguyen, Mario. They Cleaned Me Up & Outfitted Me with the Tools I Needed to …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 87, No. 42, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

• Andrews, Mary. Tough Job Market Facing Spring Grads
• Rogers, Shelby & Natalie Hayden. Welcome to the Real World – Graduation
• Anderson, Anna. WKU Grads Find Work in Americorps
• Harrison, Blake. Aramark Likely to Stay Through 2017 – Dining Services
• Williams, Joanna. All Good Things Eventually Come to an End – Graduation
• Vogt, Darren. Editorial Cartoon re: Graduation
• Harrison, Blake. Faces May Change, But the Spirit of WKU Remains the Same
• Sohl, John. The Art of Apologies: Differing Without Defacing – Hilltoppers for Life
• 2011-2012 in Review
• Harrison, Taylor. Cory …

Perceived Firm Transparency: Scale And Model Development, Jennifer Dapko

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the last few years alone, calls for transparency by consumers have grown louder. No longer are consumers willing to sit back and allow firms to make `closed door' decisions that benefit the company (and its executives) at the expense of consumers and society. This dissertation begins to answer the call for a greater understanding of transparency from both practitioner and academic perspectives. In particular, this dissertation focuses on systematically developing a succinct definition of perceived firm transparency, developing a valid measure of transparency, and empirically testing antecedents and consequences of transparency.

Two studies were conducted to develop the transparency …

Sex And The City: A Promotion Of Modern American Feminism, Cameron Michael Tufino

Theses & Dissertations

The television series Sex and the City (SATC), has left a significant impact on American society. The show displays this revelation: American women today have many established cultures of equal worth in male dominated discourses. This thesis explains how the shows narrative represents and expands feminist ideology in America. By modernizing feminist discourses, SATC challenges televisual female representation on subject matters including motherhood, sexuality, marriage, gender identity, and family. Investigating its four protagonists - Carrie, Charlotte, Miranda, and Samantha - demonstrates how the narrative contributed to the social movement of feminism. Furthermore, with analyzing its construction and display since the …

Ua12/2/1 College Heights Herald, Vol. 87, No. 41, Wku Student Affairs

WKU Administration Documents

WKU campus newspaper reporting campus, athletic and Bowling Green, Kentucky news.

• Rutledge, Chris. John Carpenter Coming to WKU Film Festival
• McKay, Michael. Cancer Never Sleeps – Relay for Life
• Koch, Cameron. Less Research, More Teaching Track Offered – Faculty
• Mack, Shelby. Best Buddies
• O’Bryan, Abby. A Thousand Words – Brettne Vasek
• Koch, Cameron. Gary Ransdell’s Report Reminds Regents of Tough Budget
• Rogers, Shelby. Unique Fundraiser Hopes to Raise $1K for United Way
• Marsupial Awards
• Fisk, Brent. Gary Ransdell’s Actions Out of Line – Censorship, Free Speech
• Bozeman, Joshua. Hilltoppers for Life Display was Vandalized – Abortion
• Aulbach, Lucas. Weather Mars …

Theories Of Culture, Identity, And Ethnomusicology: A Synthesis Of Popular Music, Cultural, And Communication Studies, Alyssa Santos

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

The Initiation Of Growth-Focused Relationships Involving Healthy Accountability At The Carbondale Church Of Christ, Stephen Shaffer

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

After several years of transition, the Carbondale Church of Christ is in the early stages of becoming a spiritual growth-focused community. However, the emerging growth community appears to reflect the prevailing cultural assumptions that growth is a personal, private, and an individual task. To shape this emergent growth culture, this project initiated a group of congregational opinion leaders, organized in pairs, into the practice of growth-focused relationships involving healthy accountability. The initiation involved a theological orientation followed by a four-week healthy accountability praxis.

The theological framework of the project involved three main aspects. First, the project used the body image …

The Accused, Nathan Damon Hopper

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Exonerations are increasing, largely thanks to the advent of DNA evidence, which several prisoners’ rights advocacy groups, like the Innocence Project, have used to prove the innocence of the convicted. But returning home after spending years imprisoned for a wrongful conviction brings with it several types of challenges: psychological, financial, and simply personal.

Roy Brown, the main subject of this story (though there are several other important characters) is an incredibly intricate man. Before his 25-to-life sentence for the murder of a county social worker, he’d faced several other convictions for a slew of misbehavings and a general disregard for …

Nothing Is Free: A Screenplay, David Hetzron

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Film has been an invaluable part of American society for nearly a century. From having political significance, to solely entertaining purposes, this versatile medium has only garnered more and more cultural investment each year of its existence. While it may not always be a vital component to a completed project, it is within the script writing process that ideas, themes, and messages are negotiated and developed. The real meaning of a story is encoded within the words. The script can be considered provocative, emotional, informative, and may incite a unique effect for each of its readers. While no reader is …

Frente Al Mar (Oceanfront): A Short Film, Adriana González-Vega

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The inspiration for Frente al Mar (Oceanfront) came in 2009 during the winter break vacation in my first year of college. I was visiting my home in Puerto Rico, when the story broke in the news about a group of families being evicted from their houses after living there for many years.

According to the reports, the government identified these families as squatters and Dominican immigrants. As I was watching the news, TV reporter Efrén Arroyo was giving a summary of the entire situation, as well as placing it in the context of similar cases in the past.

February 6, …

Connecting The Peaces: Working To Make The World A Better Place – The Encompass Journey Of Understanding, Alison Sara Kurtzman

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

On October 12, 2002, the Indonesian island of Bali experienced the worst terrorist attack in the country’s history. 202 people were killed when a bomb was detonated outside of a nightclub in the tourist city of Kuta. Among those killed was Daniel Braden, a young British man who was in Bali for a rugby tournament. Daniel’s parents believed that the attack happened because the majority of people in the nightclub were white and therefore viewed as “the enemy.” They believed that if young people had the opportunity to meet and speak with people different from themselves a lot of terrorist …

How Digital Media Affects The Nature Of Social Interactions, Johnny Liang

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for evaluating and understanding the roles of digital media, in particular the mobile phone and the internet, in our interpersonal and societal relationships. Though this paper is essentially grounded in research, drawing from the work of psychologists, cyber anthropologists, philosophers, and professors of communication studies as well as years of personal observations, it should be understood as more of a theoretical rather than research-based primer on the effects of digital media in our everyday lives. While this paper includes various ways digital connections can improve our relationships, it primarily discusses …

Late Night Television And Its Impact On The Music Industry Via Album Sales And Social Media, Matthew Robin

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Experiential learning has been a large part of my college experience. My work experiences have allowed me to understand the music industry in a very unique way. One experience was my semester in Los Angeles, where I worked at Jimmy Kimmel Live! It was there that I was able to see the influence that these shows could have on musical guests and vice versa. The late-night landscape is as booming as it ever has been, with many different outlets for talent. I wanted to demonstrate that the process of getting an artist on a late-night show is a very …

Syracuse Spotlight: Building A Greater Performing Arts Community, Alison Rose Mierzejewski

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Syracuse Spotlight is a performing arts magazine created in part to build a stronger performing arts community for the Syracuse University campus. Since the campus lacks any sort of regular coverage of live performance, I wanted to provide a resource to fill this void in student publicatons. For the most part, the coverage was not in depth, and most of the coverage was solely of the work done by the Syracuse University Drama Department.

With the creation of Syracuse Spotlight, I bring to the university community an outlet for respresentation of all performing arts – both of majors and …

You Should Know Jack: A Qualitative Study Of The Jack Lalanne Show (1951-~1965), Robert Cochrane

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Jack LaLanne hosted the first and longest running fitness program in United States broadcast history from 1951 through 1985. Since LaLanne's rise as a broadcasting celebrity, the health and fitness industry has grown from a small, somewhat-maligned field into a multi-billion dollar per year economy of its own. As LaLanne reached iconic status through his show, his name became synonymous with good health and nutrition, but the messages of his show went far beyond simple exercises. He used religious, patriotic, and biomedical messages to get his points across. In addition, he was a showman who sang to his audience, used …

August 28, 1963: Building Community Through Collective Discourse, Jennifer Nestelberger

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The August 28, 1963 March on Washington is often remembered primarily for Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, which serves as the pinnacle of civil rights movement oratory. This thesis, in contrast, examines speeches of the leaders of the "Big Six" organizations that preceded King's well-known words in order to shed light on the complexities of the movement and the outcomes that can result from meaningful dissent. Occurring at a time of division, the March emerged as a symbol of hope for change in the nation. The addresses of the day reflected this hope and helped build …

"Carneys Point" - A Short Film, Alexander Parkin

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Carneys Point is a fifteen minute short film shot on 16mm film that tells the story of a woman's life, fractured into three facets each representing an important crossroad of a single life: the disenchanting prelude to the coming of age, the anxiety of motherhood, and the mental decay of old age.

The film is divided into three vignettes, which overlap to paint a multi-layered portrait of a woman, a trilogy of the human spirit, heart, and mind.

One is the story of a little girl who is obsessed with flight and dreams of escape. Though she has the naïve …

Hue Magazine, Sadé Khadijah Muhammed

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

HUE magazine is a print title dedicated toward the uplift and synergy of women of color in America. At present, there is no publication that makes a conscious effort to not single out women of color in specific ethnic groups, but instead to talk to all of them simultaneously.

At its core, HUE’s target audience is first generation women of color between the ages of 18-25. It is a lifestyle magazine with stories in fashion, beauty, love, culture, health, entrepreneurship, and more. The goal is for the magazine to appeal to the girl in us all who loves fashion and …

Chinese International Students' Cross-Cultural Adaptation And Online Communication, Chen Wei Wu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study explored Chinese international students' computer mediated communication with both Americans and Chinese during their studying in the U.S. based on a Cross-Cultural Adaptation theory. The specific purpose of this study was to test five theorems of the theory with a sample of Chinese international students and to explore how Chinese international students' intercultural transformation, adaptive personality, host communication competence, and their interpersonal and mass communication with both host and ethnic groups associate together.

Media Convergence Of Newspapers: A Content Analysis Of The Houston Chronicle's Print- And Web-Based Content, Amanda Sullivan

Masters Theses

The channels of news media have changed. The traditional route of receiving news via a newspaper has evolved into a more digital path, leaving many to question the future of the print publication. This study evaluates the print- and Web-based content of the Houston Chronicle. The researcher adds to the field of research on news media by analyzing the online and print content of the publication, creating a new way to categorize and evaluate the subject matter by placing it into four categories: repetition, adaptation, representation, and unique. The researcher seeks to answer three research questions, discovering how each medium …

Mtv’S Jersey Shore: An Educator On Interpersonal Relationships, Gender Roles And Embracing Manhood, Brooke Swift

Honors College Theses

Throughout the history of research in the media much has been said about the connection to social learning through television. With the rise of popular genre reality television, my findings proved a lack of previous research on reality television. By using Gerbners’ cultivation theory and my own textual analysis of MTV’s Jersey Shore season five, the following research provides direct messages from the show about gender norms, heteronormative relationships and women in the male gaze. This paper presents the audience with connecting past research on social learning through media to the messages that are being conveyed to our younger generations …

Out Of The Heart Springs The Communication Of Leadership, Jodi A. Kohut

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

This study is based on the philosophical and biblical notions that words are a sacred gift from God and should be used with care. This study is concerned with how a leader uses these words in the organizational context. Edification is presented as a performative speech act by connecting its intention, “to build” to the rhetorical functions of the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts. Using Sullivan’s (1988) foundation for extending these language functions to the organizational context, the author proposes that edifying language has functions across three dimensions: 1.) Perlocutionary, subordinate building properties 2.) Illocutionary, relationship building properties and 3.) …

An Analysis Of Twitter Usage By Select Black Professional Athletes Presenting Their Online Identities, As Related To Black Hypermasculinity, Bryan Rinkus

Communication & Leadership Dissertations and Theses

The mainstream media stereotypes Black professional athletes as overly aggressive and more masculine than athletes of other ethnicities. This study examines how three professional athletes, Reggie Bush, Chad Ochocinco, and Paul Pierce use the micro-blogging service, Twitter, to present their own identities through social media. The literature explores online identity formation, parasocial interaction, and masculinity in sports. Fifty Tweets from each athlete were collected, then coded using discourse analysis, and deconstructed through impression management theory with a focus on the dramaturgical perspective. Results reveal that athletes portrayed more individualized identities when their sport was in the offseason, while athletes currently …

Belize Cookbook Project, Audrey Davidson

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

I have studied abroad in Belize and teamed up with the ladies of POWA (Productive Organization for Women in Action) to help them produce a cookbook. During this project I researched statistics about Belize to explain the developmental and sustainability problems of the country, gave thorough information about POWA's role in Belize, and recommended a realistic plan for getting the cookbook printed, shipped, and available for sale.

American Propaganda, Popular Media, And The Fall Of Jacobo Arbenz, Zachary Carl Fisher

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In June 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman of Guatemala resigned in the face of a coup led by Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas. While the United States publicly denied involvement, the coup was in fact the culmination of a plan called PBSUCCESS (CIA codeword), led by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Although PBSUCCESS lived up to its namesake, it was aided (both intentionally and unintentionally) by various U.S. media outlets. For the duration of Arbenz Guzman's regime, he and his country had been the subject of U.S. suspicions of undue Communist and Soviet influence. A general anti-Communist attitude permeated virtually all …

Insights From Charles Spurgeon's Preaching For A Changing Culture, John Lewis

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This project has been done in order to increase the amount of literature available that demonstrates how to preach to a 21st century culture and to enlighten preachers to the timeless truths that transcend from the great 19th century preacher Charles Spurgeon. A close evaluation of Charles Spurgeon's biblical preaching reveals a model for pastors to emulate in a post-modern context in the local church. Spurgeon was a master communicator and a survey of his mid to late 1800's preaching reveals those areas of his ministry that are still useful in the New Millennium. By reviewing Spurgeon's sermons and writings, …