Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Peru's Fishmeal Industry: Its Societal And Environmental Impact, Angel Vizurraga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Peru is the biggest fishmeal-producing country in the world. It has exported millions of tons of fishmeal to various parts of the world since the 1960s. However, this industry has created many problems for the Peruvian people and their environment. Past research done on this topic has failed to include the negative impacts of the fishmeal industry. My project aims to exhibit the main issues that are affected or created by the fishmeal industry. I will talk about its impact on socioeconomic matters such as malnutrition and employment, as well as its impact on the environment and the wildlife population …

Indigenous Mexicans In New York City: Immigrant Integration, Language Use, And Identity Formation, Leslie A. Martino-Velez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As indigenous Mexican immigrants migrate, settle, and raise families in the United States, parents, particularly women, and their children increasingly have contact with community institutions, such as schools. Despite their growing numbers in U.S. schools, indigenous children, youth, and their parents are often invisible due to their ethnolinguistic identities and undocumented status. Understanding what parents do to help their children is essential to understanding the first generation's integration and their children, the second generation.

To better understand this, I conducted an ethnographic research study at a bilingual Head Start program in New York City, in East Harlem, where many undocumented …

Alternative Food Production In Cauca, Colombia: The Value Of Agroecological Food Systems For Local Small Producers And Consumers, Andrea Negret

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis intends to offer an integral view of the reality of food production and distribution in the Cauca Department in Colombia, observing the different practices that have caused deep social and environmental struggles including systemic violence, displacement and environmental degradation. The first two chapters will offer a global and national context of food production to better understand the many challenges that rural populations endure in rural Cauca. Chapters four and five will explore some resistance strategies and movements that rural communities in Cauca and other Colombian regions have developed to fight against corporate agro-industrial dominance so they can protect …

Essays In Development Macroeconomics, Miguel Orozco Vazquez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that cover topics on development macroeconomics.

Chapter 1 - Misallocation of Resources and Total Factor Productivity: Evidence from Mexico. This paper aims to measure the gross output loss due to misallocation of resources in the manufacturing and service sectors in Mexico during 2008-2018 and identify the inputs of production related to it. To do so, I use Mexican Economic Censuses and an extension of Hsieh and Klenow (2009). I also include resource misallocation computations using data processed with a Bayesian model for editing and imputing data to correct for measurement error (MEC data), which …

Essays In Monetary And Macroprudential Policies, Mikheil Dvalishvili

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1 Using a medium scale general equilibrium New Keynesian business cycle model with macroprudential policy and news shocks I study the effectiveness of various combinations of the monetary and macroprudential policies. I incorporate defaults both in the banking sector and households. The results show that out of the policy strategies considered the standard Taylor rule combined with the LTV requirement that reacts countercyclically to the deviation of house prices from the steady state yields higher welfare as compared with all the other strategies considered. Additionally, the standard Taylor rule combined with either of the countercyclical LTV requirements mitigates the …

Disrepair, Displacement And Distress: Finding Housing Stories Through Data Visualizations, Jennifer Cheng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

While the COVID-19 pandemic is at its forefront a health crisis, it also triggered an upheaval in the already dire housing situation endured by many New York City renters. Tenant fears of rent increases, deferred maintenance, and displacement certainly worsened during the pandemic. But the housing crisis is, at the same time, part of a perpetual real estate cycle contingent on speculation and the symbiotic relationship of landlords, investors, and lenders in pursuit of profit – to the detriment of tenants.

Following years of lending deregulation, funding cuts, and tax reform, the financialization of housing emerged. Real estate speculation, where …

Narcommunication: The Messaging, Marketing, And Murder Of Organized Crime, Philip L. Johnson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Criminal actors are widely assumed to maintain a low profile, exerting power through corruption, coercion, and clandestine networks. Scholarship that addresses public action on the part of criminal actors focuses almost exclusively on acts of violence. However, an ample empirical record demonstrates that criminal actors also communicate publicly to broad audiences. To better understand this practice, this project focuses on the phenomenon of narco-messaging in Mexico. The project asks: what do criminal actors say when they speak publicly, and why do they say it?

The core data for this project comes from an original collection of 6,178 narco-messages that appeared …

Unraveling The Geographies Of The U.S. Public Education System: An Analysis Of Scale, Segregation, And Hegemony, Olivia Ildefonso

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Other than one or two studies that focus on specific state-wide systems of public education, there has been no accounting for how the U.S. public education system came about in relation to space and scale. My dissertation research seeks to fill in this gap. Through focusing on the development of public education in the North and the South, I provide a foundation for understanding the grounded and contested processes of scale production that largely determined the U.S. public education system’s design and function.

In each of the seven chapters, I detail how fights over the structure and purpose of public …

Adapting Small Unmanned Aerial Systems For Behavioral Research With Coastal Marine Mammals, Eric Angel Ramos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marine mammals inhabit aquatic worlds where their subsurface behavior, cryptic surface profiles, and movements make them difficult to study. New tools are needed to study coastal marine mammals in a world increasing impacted by climate change related shifts in weather and animal distribution patterns. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are important remote-sensing tools for studying a range of wildlife including terrestrial and aquatic flora and fauna. These systems offer flexible platforms for adding sensor packages needed for different applications, for example, most are equipped with high-resolution cameras and GPS sensors. The vantage point from an aerial platform dramatically improves the ability …

"It Was Handed To Them": The Origins Of Targeted Delivery And The Spirit Of Nanomedicine, Marzena Woinska

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nanotechnology is widely recognized as an important field. Since the 2000s, nano-based targeting has been a cutting-edge approach in cancer research. To specify what nanomedicine means and describe its significance at the cultural level, this study harnesses data from peer-reviewed articles published in leading scientific journals.

Balancing precariously between sociological theory and science and technology studies, this project turns to nanomedicine’s origins to address broader questions regarding the relationship between science and society and the causes of scientific discovery and technological innovation. It tells the story of nanotechnology's discursive formations taking on a life of their own and congealing into …

Mapping Learning Ecologies: A Diffractive Exploration Of The Emergence Of Learning, Laurie Hurson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, drawing on Karen Barad’s theory of agential realism (2007), I explore the learning ecology as a “specific material configuration” that produces learning, an emergent, “onto-epistemological” phenomenon of entangled being-knowing. I offer a new materialist approach to the learning ecology to better define the concept, taking seriously the material nature of the ecology and acknowledging that learning and knowing is a material practice of being in the world.

To explore learning ecologies, I conducted qualitative interview and mapping sessions with 26 undergraduate students at the City University of New York. To analyze the narrative and visual data, I …

Making Sense Of Pre-Symbolic Trauma: A Qualitative Study On The Lived Experiences Of Adults Who Were Born Extremely Prematurely, Noia Efrat

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The psychological experiences of adults (n=5) who were born at or before the threshold for extreme prematurity (weeks) was examined using Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) (Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009). Subjects were interviewed to learn about how their extreme prematurity has become organized and integrated on the levels of fantasy, identity and personality. Results showed that dysregulation and the propensity to self-contain on both somatic and affective levels were common themes across cases, supporting current research connecting the ongoing impacts of prematurity to the context of overstimulation and fundamental absence in the first months of life in the NICU. Despite …

Climate Change And Corporate Behaviors, Lei Lei

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of several chapters that span corporate disclosures on climate change-related impacts, environmental performance, common institutional ownership, and financial analyst coverage.

Chapter 1 This chapter briefly introduces this dissertation, including the motivation and structure.

Chapter 2 In this chapter, I exploit the oral and communicative nature of earnings conference calls to explore whether the discussions on climate change influence corporate environmental performance. I find strong and robust evidence that communications make firms engage more actively in environmentally beneficial investments, and thus, have better environmental profiles. Further evidence shows that mandatory disclosure may unexpectedly crowd out communications, and this …

Sweetness And Femininity: Fashioning Gendered Appetite In The Victorian Age, Michael Krondl

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since at least the nineteenth century sweetness and a preference for sweet foods has been linked to femininity. Western, middle-class women learned and reproduced normative gendered dietary behavior due to both private and public pressure to control their appetites and those of their children. In performing their gendered roles, they came to embody them through everyday rituals such as teatime. Sugary foods and drinks served as necessary props in these performances. Theorists, most prominently Jean-Jacques Rousseau, began to propose a linkage of sweet foods with femininity in the seventeen hundreds. In the following century, the medical profession explained women’s tastes …

"A Fallen Woman": The Use Of Metaphor In Psychoanalysis, Matthew Schneider

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study sought to understand the use of a central metaphor in a psychoanalytic treatment and its relationship to the process of change for the analysand. In linguistics, a metaphor is a word, phrase or idea that stands in for another idea. In psychoanalysis the relationship between conscious and unconscious conflictual material can share similar metaphorical connections as conscious thoughts or behavior often stands in for an unconscious wishes. The presence of a word or phrase that appears in speech in the context of particular affective moments in an analysand’s experience could be understood to be linked to unconscious processes …

Caribbean Immigrant Parents And Elementary School Choice In New York City, Keshia T. James

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the over 3 million immigrants of New York City, the education system is one of the many areas they must navigate in their transition to the United States (MOIA annual Report, 2018). However, for the Caribbean immigrant navigating the school system is especially hard. Of the five boroughs in New York City, Brooklyn has the second-largest immigrant population with approximately 28% of the immigrants in the borough from the Caribbean. The 2018 United States Census shows that Caribbean immigrants account for about 258000 of the approximately 900000 immigrants in Brooklyn. The racial and cultural diversity among Caribbean immigrants is …

Investigation Of Behavioral Responses Including Visual Side Biases To Social Stimuli In Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus), Jennifer R. Savoie

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cetacean field studies have reported consistent population-level side biases for foraging behaviors and this right side feeding bias is arguably the strongest in any species next to handedness in humans. Notably, experimental studies with cetaceans, particularly dolphins, have struggled to find laterality in other behaviors, and some have reported patterns that are inconsistent with those typically found in vertebrates. Side biases related to social processing have been reported in a few observational studies of wild delphinids but have not been successfully evaluated in a controlled experimental context. This dissertation investigated viewing side biases of bottlenose dolphins in two contexts: when …

Essays On Labor Economics, Gabriel Movsesyan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first chapter, I evaluate the wage impacts from exogenous and endogenous peer effects within different metropolitan areas. I construct comparison groups for workers within the same industry and Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA) residence based on support from existing literature on social networks, and estimate peer and network effects in a spatial auto-regressive model with a network structure that in- corporates group fixed effects. Inclusion of these effects reveals that both observed and unobserved factors within each network have significant effects on individual outcomes. This is the first attempt to estimate the social effects on wages using the …

Exile Garden Of The Uprooted: A Zine About Migration And The Right To Move, Sazia Afrin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exile Garden of the Uprooted is a digital zine that advocates for a borderless world where migration is treated as an equal and fundamental human right for all. Through critical analysis and experimental forms of art and writing, this zine draws attention to the structural violence used to criminalize the movement of marginalized people, the role nations and individuals play in such violence, and the practical solutions that can be employed to normalize migration and build resilient societies that support fair movement for all. The short essays, found poems, and original art work in this zine are interdisciplinary reflections on …

American Apotheosis: Ceramics And The Production Of National Identity In Post-Revolutionary New York City, Diane F. George

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study begins in the present with questions about the genealogy of American national identities in a time when they are fraught, exclusionary, and often dangerous. It examines ceramic tablewares and teawares from the post-Revolutionary War period in New York City, seeking to uncover the identities that were formed by the middle- and upper-class merchants, businessmen, and their families who may have used the wares. The theoretical framework is the concept of identity and the belief that people use material culture in social arenas in active and complex ways to produce, reproduce, announce, challenge, and change who they or the …

Tracing The Trajectory: Exploring The Origins, Iterations, And Impacts Of The Muslim Travel Ban, Dalia Yousef

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Muslim Travel Ban emerged as an explicitly discriminatory policy when former President Trump signed Executive Order 13769 on January 27, 2017. The first version of the Ban suspended the entry of travelers from seven majority-Muslim countries into the United States. After several iterations, the third version of the ban was upheld by the Supreme Court on June 26, 2018, and only rescinded by a Presidential Executive Order issued by President Joe Biden on January 20, 2021. Although the Ban received significant media attention, it was analyzed by only a few scholarly works utilizing legal and discursive approaches. This thesis …

Screen Time And The Psychological Well-Being Of U.S. Teenagers: An Exploratory Re-Analysis Of Data From The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, Russell Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Numerous studies, notably secondary analyses of survey data, have examined the possibility of adverse effects from teenagers' use of digital screen-based media--with correspondingly diverse findings. One research group in particular, led by Jean M. Twenge, has been prolific and forceful in associating adolescents’ screen time with reported increases in depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide. Others have pointed to small effect sizes, construct validity issues, and other methodological problems in the Twenge research. However, one characteristic of the group's analyses of survey data, including data from the CDC's Youth Risk Behavior Survey (YRBS), has remained unexplored: the use of metric …

Non-Argumental Clitics In Spanish And Galician: A Case Study Of The Distribution Of Solidarity And Ethical Clitics, Susana Huidobro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the properties of what traditional grammars call “superfluous elements” or non-arguments, so-called Ethical Dative Clitics (Bello 1954, Seco 1962 among others) and Solidarity Clitics (Álvarez, Rosario, X.L. Regueira & H. Monteaguedo 1986) in Spanish and Galician. This research fills an important gap in the existing formal literature on these forms, providing the first thorough syntactic and typological investigation of the latter phenomenon.

The study of non-argumental datives encounters difficulties at different levels: at a descriptive/empirical as well as at a theoretical level. From a descriptive point of view, there are no, so far in the literature, clear …

“She Too ‘Omanish’”: Young Black Women’S Sexuality And Reproductive Justice In Bluefields, Nicaragua, Ishan Elizabeth Gordon-Ugarte

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Most never-married young “Creole” (Afro-Caribbean) women in Bluefields, Nicaragua are raised in fundamentalist Protestant families and institutions that emphasize sexual abstinence before marriage. In this context, abstinence is required to maintain social standing and “respectability.” Nevertheless, women in Bluefields, the administrative center of Caribbean Nicaragua, exhibit what Creoles themselves understand to be high rates of sexuality and pregnancy among post-menarche unmarried teenaged women (USAID, 2012; Mitchell et al. 2015). Such young women’s pregnancies occur at an important developmental stage of their lives and have long been associated by social scientists with adverse social, emotional, and health situations. These scholars have …

A Multilevel Analysis Of Political Risk, Marlon J. Guzman Valdera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay aims to diminish the conceptual fragmentation that exists, in relation to political risk, by introducing a multilevel approach to assess risk. While traditional approaches understand political risk to be a result of the political action of host-states against multinationals, this essay shows that there are other actors, like the host-nation civil society and the international community, that also play a role in the production of political risk. Although traditional approaches assert that political risk can solely target multinationals individually, this paper states that risk can affect a firm at an industrial and country level. I claim that political …

Property In Pieces: Land, Oil And Uncertainty In A Mexican Ejido, Margaret Cruz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Pemex has been a symbol of Mexican nationalism and a steward of the nation’s oil patrimony for more than 75 years, but few scholars have studied the messy ways in which oil extraction has played out in rural communities. This dissertation does that, while also analyzing the way in which various forms of property—national patrimony, private property, and communal property—are articulated in three dimensions (3D) in an ejido (communal agrarian community) in northern Veracruz. Horizontally, land has shifted from being collectively owned and managed to being divided into individually held plots which are not always recognized. Meanwhile, a web of …

Community Resilience: Stories About Chinatowns In Nyc During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Wendy W. Tan

Publications and Research

After two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the sentiment that future is still insecure, and fluid has been widely shared by all the American communities. However, for this essay, I touched upon the effects and their measures of staying strong in a few Chinese American communities in New York City.

Control, Allegiance, And Shame In Male Qing Dynasty Hairstyles, Carolle Pinkerton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is about the politicization of hairstyles in imperial China. They indicated conformity with social norms, or rebellion against them. This was especially true under the country’s last dynasty. The Manchu conquerors imposed their own hairstyle, the queue, on their Han Chinese subjects to make their rule palpable to China’s illiterate millions. “Hair martyrs” who refused to accept this “barbarous” hairstyle were ruthlessly eliminated. The Manchus had feared assimilation into the much larger Han population. But the introduction of one uniform male hair style for both Manchus and Han blurred the lines between the two groups. In this way …

Past-Futures Of Harlem: Black Urban Space At The Limits Of Spatial Justice, Dane C. Ruffin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The racial capitalist development of the U.S. metropolitan landscape has been shaped by the involuntary displacement and dispersal of Black communities. From the dispossession of the Half-Free Negro Lots around the Fresh Collect pond in the seventeenth century to the clearing of Seneca Village to build Central Park in the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth-century police-facilitated “race riot” in the Tenderloin district of Manhattan, which fueled the move to Harlem, the four-hundred year history of Black Manhattan alone provides substantial evidence of this and is in no way unique in this regard. Incomplete, yet ongoing, is what …

From Abortion Rights To Reproductive Justice: A Call To Action, Erica Goldblatt Hyatt, Judith L.M. Mccoyd, Mery Diaz

Publications and Research

As aggressive cultural and legislative attacks on abortion rights and access continue, we call upon social workers to pursue the liberatory aims of the reproductive justice (RJ) movement. We argue that the RJ framework, rooted in feminist theory, aligns with social work’s social justice ethos and goals, appropriately guiding advocacy and intervention. After outlining the central aims and tenets of the RJ movement, we consider policies that impair RJ and those that could promote RJ, focusing on enhancing body sovereignty, childbearing, and parenting. We conclude with concrete recommendations for how social workers can pursue RJ professionally and personally.