Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Writing For The Social Sciences, Maria L. Plochocki

Open Educational Resources

The attached syllabus was used in the course, ENGL 21002 - R: Writing for the Social Sciences. It serves as a schedule and guide to the course, covering reading assignments, deadlines, course policies, and other essential information.

Graphic Representations Of Grammatical Gender In Spanish Language Anarchist Publications, Mariel Mercedes Acosta Matos

Publications and Research

This paper offers a descriptive analysis of the suffixes -@, -x, -e and other orthographic innovations as transgressions to the genderedness of Spanish language. First I discuss the grammatical rules of expressing gender in Spanish and a summary of the ongoing debates concerning linguistic sexism and androcentrism in Spanish language. Then I present some examples of the gender neutral suffixes drawn from articles found in 3 “Do It Yourself” journals published online by three anarchist collectives in Latin America.

Reading A Scholarly Publication, Silvia L. Lin Hanick

Open Educational Resources

LIF 101, Liberal Arts: Social Science and Humanities

This assignment was designed to reintroduce students to library resources and to give students an opportunity to examine scholarly publications in parts and in detail, without the pressure of using the article in a formal research paper, or having to understand the entire article.

To prepare for this assignment, we started class with a writing exercise to answer, “what makes something scholarly?” All responses were written on the board; together we identified common ideas that came up more than once. I added to their responses with a short lecture about the information …

Who Am I? Degreeworks Edition, Jesse Schwartz

Open Educational Resources

Designed for LIF101: Liberal Arts First Year Seminar, “Who Am I? DegreeWorks Edition” is developed with the intention to help students (and maybe also their professors!) navigate Pathways [a system of general education requirements and transfer guidelines designed to ease student transfer between CUNY colleges] facilitate advising, and understand general degree expectations. By projecting an actual DegreeAudit in class, students better understand academic requirements as well as their academic profile within CUNY.

The entire assignment takes one to two hours of class time, and then a further two to three hours for students to complete on their own. Obviously, as …

Lif101 Final Project: My Guide To Success, Ellen Quish

Open Educational Resources

Overview: This project is an opportunity for LIF101 students to reflect on their first semester at LaGuardia, to review what they’ve learned in the First Year Seminar for the Liberal Arts: Social Science and Humanities, and to create a plan that serves as a resource for their academic and professional success moving forward. My Guide to Success requires students to think carefully about their time at LaGuardia and be intentional in planning their next steps through graduation, and beyond. The paper is worth 15 points out of 100.

Zero Textbook Cost Syllabus For Lib 3065 (Research Methods And Resources For Writers), Christopher Tuthill

Open Educational Resources

This course explores the theoretical and practical impact of information research on writing. Students develop proficiency in evaluating, identifying, and using relevant print and web sources to locate business, government, biographic, political, social and statistical information necessary for in-depth journalistic reportage and other forms of research and writing.

Losing Its Way: The Landmarks Preservation Commission In Eclipse, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

New York City’s Landmarks Preservation Commission has an admirable history of protecting the city's historic character. Increasingly in recent years, the commission has backed away from proactively designated sites of historical, architectural, or cultural significance as city landmarks. At the same time, the commission has shown greater deference to the owner of a property when deciding whether to designate, and to the wishes of the owners of designated properties in matters of regulation, notwithstanding that owner consent is nowhere in the landmarks law. At the same time, the commission has introduced new definitions, such as “period of significance,” contributing/non-contributing, and …

Hyper-Selectivity, Racial Mobility, And The Remaking Of Race, Van C. Tran, Jennifer Lee, Oshin Khachikian, Jess Lee

Publications and Research

Recent immigrants to the United States are diverse with regard to selectivity. Hyper-selectivity refers to a dual positive selectivity in which immigrants are more likely to have graduated from college than nonmigrants in sending countries and the host population in the United States. This article addresses two questions. First, how does hyper-selectivity affect second-generation educational outcomes? Second, how does second-generation mobility change the cognitive construction of racial categories? It shows how hyper-selectivity among Chinese immigrants results in positive second-generation educational outcomes and racial mobility for Asian Americans. It also raises the question of whether hyper-selectivity operates similarly for non-Asian groups. …

Civilization, Again!, Despina Lalaki

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Reflection In The First Year Seminar: Moving Beyond The Single Story, Christine Marks

Open Educational Resources

This series of in-class and at home reflective assignments was designed for the Liberal Arts: Social Science and Humanities First Year Seminar. Drawing on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk “The Danger of a Single Story” and the chapter “Citizens of the World” from Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit, students begin to develop an understanding of the role of the liberal arts in moving towards a more complex perception of cultural differences across the world. They also reflect on their own biases and experiences during the first semester. Students write the first reflection after discussing the TED talk and the …

Jewish Germany: An Enduring Presence From The Fourth To The Twenty-First Century, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Jewish Germany: An enduring presence from the fourth to the twenty-first century.

Setting Goals Paper, Silvia L. Lin Hanick

Open Educational Resources

This assignment was designed to help students bring together the multiple threads of the First Year Seminar; students contextualize their past, present, and future stories within their personal, academic, and career goals. This assignment asked students to revise the writing they’ve done in past ePortfolio reflections, incorporate outside information from a range of sources, and plan out a realistic path for achieving their goals at LaGuardia and beyond.

Students are prepared for this assignment throughout the semester:

• In week 2, we talk about the value of the personal narrative via the About Me reflection for ePortfolio. Why does your past …

Soap From Human Fat: The Case Of Professor Spanner, John A. Drobnicki

Publications and Research

Review of the book Soap from Human Fat: The Case of Professor Spanner, by Monika Tomkiewicz and Piotr Semków (Gdynia: Wydawnictwo Róza Wiatrów, 2013).

The Social Provision Of Healthcare To Migrants In The Us And In China, Van C. Tran, Katharine M. Donato

Publications and Research

This article develops a comparative analysis of healthcare provision to migrants in the US and in China. It proceeds in three parts. First, we begin by describing the growth of the unauthorized population and trace the evolution of social provision of healthcare to immigrants, highlighting the restrictive nature of federal social provisions and greater autonomy of state and local governments in redefining eligibility criteria in the US. Second, we examine the impact of legal status on healthcare access and utilization among Mexicans, using original data from the 2007 Hispanic Healthcare Survey and the Mexican Migration Project. We find that unauthorized …

Transformed, I'M Sure: A (Polite) Introduction To Fair Use In Dh, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This presentation looks at how the words "including" and "such as" in the fair use section of United States copyright law (i.e., Section 107 of Title 17 of the United States Code) allow for unforeseen fair uses, including transformative works made by digital humanists.

Neighborhood Research Essay, Dominique Zino

Open Educational Resources

The following “Neighborhood Research Paper” assignment has been used in LIF 101 for Social Science and Humanities students, but could be adapted to give students the chance to practice disciplinary thinking in a variety of fields. The main objectives of the assignment are

1. to give students the chance to engage with guided secondary and primary source research by using key resources on campus, especially the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives and the Library;
2. to help students practice fundamental writing and critical thinking skills (summarizing, paraphrasing, quoting, synthesis, analysis);
3. to give students a chance to conduct preliminary ethnographic research (i.e. field notes, …

Cultures And Politics Of The Global Drug War [Urban Studies/English], Justin Rogers-Cooper

Open Educational Resources

This staged and high stakes Urban Studies assignment was developed in conjunction with two Center for Teaching and Learning Seminars at LaGuardia Community College: “The Pedagogy of the Digital Ability” and “The Next Generation ePortfolio.” All Urban Studies courses at LaGuardia are writing intensive, and all are designated for the college’s Global Learning Core Competency and the Written Communication Ability. Urban Studies courses exist on different points of many programmatic curriculum maps for Liberal Arts majors, but students usually take it as a midpoint course. Dozens of different majors completed this assignment and take Urban Studies courses more generally, including …

Formalizing The Umwelt, Rohit J. Parikh

Publications and Research

In the early part of the XXth century, Jacob from Uexkuell introduced the notion of the Umwelt which is the personal world which animals and humans live in. It is understood that each of us has our own Umwelt. This paper is an attempt to understand the notion of Umwelt using tools from logic and decision theory.

Self-Care Of Women Enrolled In Doctoral Psychology Programs: A Concept Mapping Approach, Amanda L. Almond

Publications and Research

As increasing numbers of women pursue degrees in health service psychology, it is important to understand what they do to promote their wellness in light of the psychosocial stressors associated with doctoral studies. The purpose of this investigation was to identify and conceptualize a diverse range of health promotion behaviors through the application of a mixed methods concept mapping design. Twelve participants sorted qualitative responses from 390 women in health service psychology pertaining to their personal self-care behaviors, resulting in a list of 112 'moderately' to 'extremely' important self-care behaviors. Six clusters of self-care activities emerged: physical wellness, relaxation and …

Dialogicity In Written Specialised Genres, Editado Por Luz Gil-Salom Y Carmen Soler-Monreal (2014)., David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Review of Dialogicity in Written Specialised Genres, edited by Luz Gil-Salom and Carmen Soler-Monreal.

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Among The Palms1, Lee Haring

Publications and Research

Born out of the convergence of intellectual traditions and owning a borrowing capacity analogous to the one that engenders creole languages, the study of folklore, or folkloristics, claims the right to adapt and remodel political, psychological, and anthropological insights, not only for itself but for the humanities disciplines of philosophy, art, literature, and music (the “PALM” disciplines). Performance-based folkloristics looks like a new blend, or network, of elements from several of those. What looks like poaching, which is a common practice for folksong and folk narrative, can be examined in the PALM disciplines under names like intertextuality and plagiarism. Nation-oriented …

The Market, Claudia Zamora Valencia

Theses and Dissertations

The Market is a short science fiction essay film that explores ideas and values attached to the “local food” movement, and how they manifest themselves in the act of consumption at a farmers’ market in a gentrified neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.

A Mission At 311, Nan Li

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis intends to look at how the aftermath of Holocaust has a tremendous life-changing impact on the children of Holocaust survivors, and to explore how these people has carried these misfortunes and burden to be resilient and joyful in their everyday lives.

Universal Alienation And The Real Subsumption Of Daily Life Under Capital: A Response To Hardt And Negri, David Harvey

Publications and Research

This contribution is part of a debate between Michael Hardt/Toni Negri and David Harvey on the occasion of Marx’s bicentenary (May 5, 2018). The discussion focuses on the question of what capitalism looks like today and how it can best be challenged. In this article, David Harvey responds to Hardt and Negri’s previous debate-contributions.

Splendid Disarray: The Music Of Andrew Mckenna Lee, Nina Berman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of composer Andrew McKenna Lee spans multiple genres and styles, and does so in a way that draws parallels to the New York City downtown new music scene as well as the progressive and experimental rock scenes. These connections are especially apparent when looking at his 2013 song cycle The Knells, written for Lee’s ensemble, also called The Knells, which he assembled expressly for the purpose of performing this work. The band consists of three female singers singing without vibrato, backed by a rock group, plus percussion and string quartet. Lee deploys these forces to create a sound …

Perspectives From The Streets And The Classrooms In The Same 'Hood: Linguistic Landscapes Of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, Luis Guzman Valerio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the linguistic landscape of the neighborhood of Sunset Park, in Brooklyn, New York by taking into account both a main commercial avenue and a public school with a dual language bilingual program in English and Spanish. Sunset Park is a multi-ethnic and immigrant neighborhood (Hum, 2014). While research has been done into the linguistic landscape of streets, cities, and communities, on the one hand, and about the linguistic landscape in education, on the other, the co-existence of these two in the same context has barely been studied (cf. Maldonado, 2015). This dissertation makes a contribution to the …

Being In Performance: A Philosophical Account Of The Embodied Actor, Brad M. Krumholz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation I present and analyze three distinct actor-training exercises primarily through the lens of the Embodied Cognition (EC) branch of contemporary philosophy, which attempts to frame human understanding as a fully embodied interaction with the environment. Drawing from neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, and other branches of philosophy, EC provides both an excellent set of tools and a strong theoretical framework to help explain how people encounter meaning in life. I apply its unique perspectives to this philosophical account of the embodied actor as I analyze the various elements at play in actor training praxis, which allows me to shed …

Black Business As Activism: Ebony Magazine And The Civil Rights Movement, Seon Britton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the fight for justice, equality, and true liberation, African American organizations and institutions have often acted as a voice for the African American community at large focusing on common issues and concerns. With the civil rights movement being broadcast across the world, there was no better time for African American community and civil rights organizations to take a role within the movement in combatting the oppression, racism, and discrimination of white supremacy. Often left out of this history of the civil rights movement is an analysis of black-owned private businesses, also giving shape to the African American community. Black …

“The Childish, The Transformative, And The Queer”: Queer Interventions As Praxis In Children’S Cartoons, Heather Wright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud considers “the simplified reality of the cartoon,” establishing a definition and theory for the medium (30). McCloud believes that cartoons possess “a special power” that is tied to their unique ability to “focus our attention on an idea” (31). Put simply, there is something about cartoons that allows for an easy exchange of concepts. Cartoons can teach. Using cartoons, a general term, to refer to both comics and animation, this thesis examines the transformative power of queer world building and intervention in recent children’s cartoons and how it functions, and can …