Arts and Humanities Commons^™

A Model For Understanding Anxiety And Practices To Alleviate It As It Relates To Divine Sovereignty And Human Free Will, Patrick K. Prentice

All Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research focuses on the lack of practices that address emotional anxiety in rural church attendees in Southwestern Iowa caused by the apparent absence of control over situations that require trusting divine sovereignty or human free will. The research theorized that the anxiety of rural church attendees in Southwestern Iowa is caused by inadequate control over adverse situations. As a result, adverse impacts were always considered harmful. However, according to Scripture, what an individual perceives as harmful is always used by God for their good in some manner. Thus, anxiety seems rooted in a desire to avoid perceived harm rather …

Barriers To Churches Understanding How They Are Impacted By White Supremacy Culture, Pamela R. Ngunjiri

All Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The problem this project addressed was the barriers to Christian churches' understanding how they are impacted by white supremacy culture. The research identified themes that hinder racial equity and arrived at recommendations on how to disentangle white supremacy culture and the Christian Church. Biblical and theological resources were utilized to provide support for the scriptural foundation of the Christian faith, and current literature provided scholarly backing to identify the barriers to understanding the possibility of the entanglement of Christian churches and white supremacy culture. Conclusions reached included that the same foundational faith among folks of different races/color, results in a …

The Personal, The Political, And The Hope For A Better Future: Disrupting The Traditional Rape Narrative In Young Adult Fiction, Melissa Roberson

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation critically examines the current state of young adult rape fiction to explore the ways in which contemporary young adult rape novels engage with different aspects of rape culture and the systems in place that sustain it. Prioritizing issues related to disclosure, hope, healing, and justice, my investigation into these novels demonstrates the importance of attending to both the framing of rape and the challenges associated with narrativizing sexual violence in the context of adolescent literature. Ultimately, I argue that in order to challenge and disrupt the further entrenchment of societal attitudes and (mis)perceptions of rape that perpetuate the …

Intersectional Embodiment: An Exploration Of Women's Bodily Experiences In Contemporary American Literature, Olivia Marie Wertz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

My dissertation, “Intersectional Embodiment: An Exploration of Women’s Bodily Experiences in Contemporary American Literature,” examines contemporary American novels written by women of color in order to illuminate how women of color protagonists realize, protect, and embrace their bodies as a source of power in a deeply oppressive society. Specifically, I analyze Kindred (1979) and the Parable novels (1993, 1998) by Octavia Butler, Displacement (2019), a graphic novel by Kiku Hughes, and Severance (2018) by Ling Ma. In these novels, women protagonists must account for their bodies to understand their identity, combat oppressive bodily control, and, above all, survive. Both neo-historical …

No Sweeter Sound: Musicking, Transformative Pedagogy, And Collaborative Social Justice In Choral Settings, Natalie N. Shaffer

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Choral music and its conductors occupy a tenuous space in the 21st century. In a new cultural atmosphere influenced by Gen Z’s expectation of welcomed diversity and intolerance for injustice, TikTok’s rapid global dissemination of information and entertainment, and society’s desire for authentic connection following the Covid-19 pandemic, the dichotomies present in choral music are no longer being glossed over. Difficult conversations about race, gender, ableism, social location, and other intersectional identifiers are at the forefront of academic writing and conference presentations. Evidence of transformative pedagogy and culturally responsive practices are beginning to appear in classroom syllabi and rehearsal techniques …

Consumer Experiences In The Secondhand Market: Finances, Frugality, Fashion, & Fun, Melissa Chasko Turner

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Secondhand apparel refers to clothing and accessories that have been previously owned, handed down, donated, or resold to others. They are a sustainable product because they are reused instead of being discarded into landfills. Consumer experience refers to the emotional and psychological responses individuals have during their interactions with products and services across all touchpoints. In the secondhand apparel market, consumer experience plays a significant role in product purchasing, and the unique aspects of retail entertainment serve as key motivators. Consumer-perceived risk refers to the uncertainty of adverse outcomes associated with purchasing a product. Purchasing secondhand apparel poses similar yet …

White Paper And Black Water: Environmental Control Of Labor In Appalachian Paper Mill Communities, Matthew C. Powell

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

In several small Appalachian communities, the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Company dominated the local landscape. The company stripped the mountainsides of spruce trees for pulpwood and used rivers for industrial processes and waste disposal. The small towns along these rivers and between these mountains relied on paper mills for employment. Corporate control over the natural environment, and water more specifically, was a necessary requirement for paper production, but also acted as a source of power over employees and their communities. When paper workers sought to organize, the company responded by leveraging their control over the environment against them to …

Nuclear Reactions: Making Sense Of The Accident At Three Mile Island, Jordan Emily Bennett

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This thesis examines the causes and consequences of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in March of 1979. First detailing the event, this thesis then examines activist narratives following the accident, with a particular focus on women’s “motherist” activism in the community outside the plant, before turning to questions of memory and the creation of a public memory of survivorship in the community surrounding the plant. In considering these questions, this thesis seeks to shed light on the differences between official and communal narratives of the accident in an effort to understand the impacts that the partial meltdown at …

Student Self-Evaluation As Assessment: A Reflective Tool For Ungraded Pedagogy, Jennifer Corby

Open Educational Resources

This Google Form-based self-evaluation tool is designed to support a student-centered, ungraded approach to assessment in an introductory political science course. Rooted in critical pedagogy and Universal Design for Learning principles, the form invites students to reflect honestly and thoroughly on their own work. For each assignment, students are asked to articulate the expectations, assess the extent of their engagement, and reflect on their learning. The tool reinforces metacognition, accountability, and democratic participation in the learning process.

Posters, Propaganda, & Bloody Saturdays: Making China Christian: How Media & Missionaries Made China Christian, Kristy Lee

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis investigates the role of religious groups and media in influencing the public perception of Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

Feel Bad To Discard A Fashion Product: How Ai Designers Influence Individuals' Sustainable Consumption, Ha Kyung Lee, Dooyoung Choi

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

This study explores how AI technology in fashion design influences consumers' sustainable consumption behaviors, focusing on emotional attachment to products. By comparing AI-generated and human-designed fashion items, the study examines how designer type impacts negative emotions about discarding products, mediated by emotional attachment. Results from two experimental studies reveal that designer type significantly affects negative emotions toward discarding human-designed items, but emotional attachment was not influenced by designer type in the first study. This lack of difference may be due to personal characteristics that moderate the effect. The second study found that individuals who perceive AI as human-like form stronger …

Exploring The Impact Of Value Co-Creation Through Ai-Driven Chatbbots On Customer Repeat Purchases, Dooyoung Choi, Jaeha Lee

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) framework, this study explores how perceived value co-creation during chatbot interactions influences customer repeat purchase intentions through cognitive, emotional, and social responses to chatbots. A survey of 220 participants revealed that perceived value co-creation significantly affected repeat purchase intentions, with cognitive evaluations, emotional reactions, and social value serving as key mediators. However, the direct effect of value co-creation on purchase intentions was not significant. The findings suggest that while value co-creation enhances consumer engagement, repeat purchases occur only when consumers experience positive cognitive, emotional, and social outcomes. Therefore, it is crucial for retailers to incorporate …

Disorienting "Western" Viewers With Nacer Khemir's Desert Trilogy, Kristian Peterson

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this essay, I explore tensions that arise when creating alternative cinematic visions of Muslim life, specifically frictions emerging from the goal of shifting public perception of the community and patterns of self-orientalization. Here, I complicate assumptions about the representation of Islam by looking at a self-articulated presentation of Muslims through the narrative feature series the Desert Trilogy, by Tunisian director Nacer Khemir (born 1948). I argue that Khemir is ensnared by ahistorical Islamic nostalgia and largely reinforces romantic orientalist aesthetics in his films. While his portrait of Muslims is much more “positive” than those in the broader archive, it …

Cluster Conversation: (Re)Writing Our Histories, (Re)Building Feminist Worlds: Working Toward Hope In The Archives, Ruth Osorio, Lamaya Williams, Megan Mcintyre

English Faculty Publications

[Introduction] "Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. [...] Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency." - Rebecca Solnit

In 2018, Cheryl Glenn wrote, "The work of feminist rhetorical historiography is far from done; in fact, it has just begun-and it is anchored in hope." Following Glenn, we explore hope in this cluster as a methodological imperative in the archives. Informed by theorists Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Rebecca Solnit, and Cornel West, the writers in this Cluster Conversation envision hope as a radical orientation toward …

‘‘I Am Not This, Not Here, This Time’’: Claudia Emerson’S Infusion Suite As A Compelling Account Of The Lived Experience Of Cancer, Chris Foss

English & Linguistics Articles

Claudia Emerson’s Infusion Suite section within her poetry collection Impossible Bottle is a significant contemporary literary representation of cancer. In this twelve-poem sequence, Emerson dispenses with the typical martial metaphors so often used to represent this lived experience. Instead, she focuses on more mundane everyday moments in a way that acknowledges and respects the humanity of all those at the treatment center—especially that of the patients. Emerson refuses to airbrush out the daunting, debilitating aspects of cancer, but she also preserves space for light and life.

Towards The Improvement Of Literacy Education For English-Speaking Caribbean Immigrants, Patricia Antoinette Daley

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This phenomenological study examines the literacy experiences of English-speaking Caribbean (ESC) immigrant students in public schools in New York City, as well as the structural factors surrounding their experiences and the culturally sensitive solutions to these experiences. Although in the English-speaking Caribbean context students often use English, many of them also speak Creole or a dialect. They are linguistic forms, including Jamaican, Trinidadian, Guyanese, among other Creoles, that are frequently misinterpreted or underestimated in formal education systems, resulting in confusion and a lack of appropriate instructional support. This linguistic identity crisis among the Jamaicans through ingrained colonial notions that the …

Volume 28, Issue 1 Full Contents

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Author Biographical Notes

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Call For Papers

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

No abstract provided.

Marked By Valor: The “Lost” History Of The 6th United States Colored Troops, Heavy Artillery, Daniel William O’Sullivan

CGU Theses & Dissertations

“Marked by Valor: The ‘Lost’ History of the 6 th U.S.C.T., Heavy Artillery,” argues that the camaraderie of having been a Black Union soldier solidified a sub-culture of Black veterans and their families in Natchez, Mississippi, that cohered throughout the Reconstruction period using the tools and the affiliations first gained in slavery and strengthened during the soldiers’ time in the army. Underlying this narrative is an interpretation of Southern history that maintains that we cannot understand the events of the postwar period—not only for Black veterans, but to some extent all freed people—if we do not understand all that came …

The Leaf That Tapped: Literary Still Life In The Novels Of Virginia Woolf, Willa Frank

Pomona Senior Theses

Literary still life is a vital element of Virginia Woolf’s writing which recurs in almost all of her novels. Through these passages, she attends to the object world, portrays the animation of nonhuman entities, and adapts the aesthetic movements of her time present in modernist still life to the page. In this adaptation, Woolf’s literary still life becomes defined not by its stasis but rather by the rhythm she creates through the layering of these passages, one of the gathering and releasing of stillness. In this thesis, I propose literary still life as a way of thinking about the object-focused …

Huchum: The Legacy Of Fire Suppression, Indigenous Land Management, And Media Representation, Carolyn Coyne

Pomona Senior Theses

In my thesis, I examine how various forms of news media from the 1900s to present day in Ohlone territory have framed a particular hegemonic ideology around fire that matches early colonial journal entries – an ideology that is fueled by fear, sensationalism, and exclusion and directly commits violence against the Ohlone people. I investigate this time period because this is when modern news corporations, like The New York Times, rose into prominence. Specifically, I question how media representations of fire inform regulations over controlled burns; what are the similarities in discourse between media framing and policy? What tactics are …

Narrative (In)Completion In Chaucer’S The Canterbury Tales And Woolf’S The Waves, Ananya Ramkumar

Pomona Senior Theses

I examine how narrative and personal completion manifest—and are continually unsettled—in The Canterbury Tales and The Waves. Though separated by centuries and written within vastly different literary traditions, both texts explore the tension between fragmentation and wholeness: the ways in which stories and characters can be constructed from partial, shifting materials, and the ways in which the illusion of completeness can mask deeper absences (holes). Drawing on Woolf’s own theories of reading and character—and her sense that readers instinctively create “rickety and ramshackle” wholes from scattered impressions—I will consider how each text engages with the paradox of narrative closure. …

Expression In Spinoza’S Metaphysics Of Attributes, Emilio Esquivel Marquez

Pomona Senior Theses

Spinoza is famous for his insistence on the fundamental unity of all things, but he never explains how diverse metaphysical elements can join up to form a unified substance. I argue that this gap in his argument is not an obstacle for Spinoza's systematic metaphysics: although he does not justify the unity-variety relation in strictly rationalist terms, his system is founded on a basic posit that guarantees their union. I describe this central posit, the concept of “expression,” through a detailed reading of Spinoza’s pivotal argument for the diversity of attributes in Ethics 1P10S. I propose that Spinoza’s theory of …

Art As Witness: Carrying Christian Iconographies In The Works Of Henry Ossawa Tanner During The Gilded Age To Contemporary Autobiographical Testimonial Art, Ziona King

Pomona Senior Theses

Culminated in a solo exhibition of three works titled the prodigal daughter and The Great High Priest, Baptism, and The Lord of Hosts, this research explores the implications of the Christian methodologies and iconographies in the works of Henry Ossawa Tanner to influence testimonial artwork containing personal Christian iconographies of water baptism, spiritual encounter in everyday life, the lion of Judah, bowls, and more interpretive motifs.

Disrupting The Timeline: Challenging Notions Of A Singular, Linear Early Muslim Historiography, Grayson D. Shaw

Pomona Senior Theses

Few historical events have received the same attention in the formative years of Islam as the so-called “‘Abbāsid Revolution” in 132 AH/750 CE. In both the medieval and modern contexts, this event has been recognized as a monumental formation from which the rest of Islamic history comes downstream from. Problematically, there are no cohesive historical sources from the losers of this conflict; the Umayyads. Utilizing numismatic and architectural evidence, I argue that the alleged rupture between the Umayyads and their ‘Abbāsid successors is overblown by historiography two centuries after the fact. Then, I further analyze what this continuity means for …

The Fragile Fabric Of Society: An Insight Into Religion In Bosnia And Herzegovina, Tomislav Tadić

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The question of the social function of religion is undoubtedly one of the most important questions at the level of global social ontology. In this context, the sociology of religion turns out to be one of the most significant branches within contemporary sociology. Bearing in mind the events that mark the current global political situation, especially the Russian Federation's aggression against Ukraine, the need to rethink the relationship between ethnicity and religion as a special expression of the crisis of secularity within the limits of the "radicalized consequences of modernity" further intensifies. The paper is composed of two parts: 1) …

Samuel Štefan Osuský’S Critique Of Church And Society In The Face Of Totalitarianism, Michal Valčo, Katarína Valčová

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

This paper provides a systematic review analysis of the relevant works of Slovak philosopher and theologian Samuel Štefan Osuský (1888-1975), focusing on his critical perspective concerning the responses of the Church (mainly the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Augsburg Confession in Slovakia) and society to the ideological and political dangers of fascism and Nazism in 20th-century Central Europe. Drawing on his major writings, including his prophetic 1937 lecture "Filozofia boľševizmu, fašizmu a hitlerizmu" [The Philosophy of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Hitlerism] and the courageous 1942 "Pastiersky list k židovskej otázke" [Pastoral Letter on the Jewish Question], we explore Osuský’s diagnosis of institutional …

Kyiv Christianity In The Portraits Of Metropolitans: Artistic Language And Coding Of Identity In The 18th Century, Oleksandr Lukyanenko, Vitaly Dmytrenko, Vita Dmytrenko, Nazar Maistruk

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

The article is devoted to the analysis of the iconography of the Kiev metropolitans of the 18th century as a unique phenomenon of religious Ukrainian Baroque art. The portraits of the bishops are considered not only as representative images of spiritual power, but also as carriers of cultural codes that record a special type of “Kyiv Christianity” formed on the border of Eastern and Western civilizations. Special attention is paid to Baroque aesthetics – the splendor of the bishop’s vestments, the ornamentality, theatricality of the compositions and at the same time the psychological depth of the portrayed. The study shows …

Alive For The Wake, Anna Kate Powell

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

In the year 2046, bacteria strain B. bibitor has rendered all petroleum hydrocarbon compounds unrefinable. Paramedic Amanda Bailey finds hope in the resilience of humanity but struggles when she learns the powers that be would rather concentrate their efforts on fighting B. bibitor—restoring infected hydrocarbons to their previously refinable (and profitable) nature—rather than investing in already-developed clean firm energies and renewable material manufacture.