Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Stress As A Cultural Tool In Higher Education, Nadia Ramjit

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study focuses on how two groups of college freshmen, the traditional age and nontraditional age students use the word stress as a cultural tool in their college adjustment process. This topic is explored through Vygotsky’s concept of language understood as a cultural tool, enacting meaning as developed through socio-cultural relations (1978). Three research questions explore how students articulate stress in diverse ways: How do traditional and nontraditional college freshmen use the word stress as a cultural tool to mediate their experiences in the college environment: academically, socially, personally, regarding goal commitments, etc.? What are the factors that traditional and …

The Failure Of Post-War Reconstruction In Jaffna, Sri Lanka: Indebtedness, Caste Exclusion And The Search For Alternatives, Ahilan Kadirgamar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Reconstruction of contemporary war-torn societies can lead to further dispossession and social exclusion, particularly through neoliberal development policies and financialized indebtedness. This dissertation analyses post-war reconstruction of the Jaffna District in the Northern Province of Sri Lanka after the end of a brutal three decade long civil war in May 2009, through a survey and ethnographic study of one village, Pathemany and its oppressed caste quarter, Bharathy Veethy. Drawing on a study of Pathemany village on agrarian change before the war, this study addresses contemporary questions about land, rural incomes, rural debt and caste structure. The study evaluates reconstruction policies …

Production Of Energy And Environmental Protection As A Prerequisite For Sustainable Development, Diana Baus

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper explains why renewable energy is a prerequisite for sustainable development. The development of renewable energy sources is important because renewable energy sources have a very important role in reducing emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere, eradicate poverty and increase the employment rate. In the first section the paper introduces renewable energy sources. The focus is on the function of solar energy, wind power, biomass, geothermal energy, and hydroelectric energy and their implementation globally. The second part of the paper elaborates on the economic, political, and social aspects for the development of renewable energy sources. …

Contesting Victimhood: A Linguistic And Legal Anthropological Analysis Of Defendant Experiences In New York’S Human Trafficking Intervention Courts, Mark T. Romig

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs) have been operating in New York City in an effort to connect victims of human trafficking to treatment programs. Unfortunately, the net that the courts cast was too wide and people who did not identify as victims of human trafficking were coerced into treatment programs that they did not need or want. Through textual discourse analysis and ethnographic observation, this paper explores the contestation of victimhood in HTICs by focusing on the experiences of defendants and how they are perceived by the police, judges, and other agents of the HTICs. Before entering the HTICs, defendants …

Merchandise, Promotion, And Accessibility: Keith Haring’S Pop Shop, Amy L. Raffel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the peak of his career in New York, Keith Haring took his highly recognizable artistic style and distributed it in the form of merchandise in his Pop Shop, established in 1986. Stemming from his early work displayed on the New York streets, directly within public space, and his explorations into mass media strategies, he learned he could make his work accessible to new audiences outside contemporary art institutions and art circles. He translated his work across several surfaces: from subways or canvases, to everyday functional merchandise, such as buttons, t-shirts, and bags sold in his shop. Responding to a …

Evaluative Mind: Extraneous Influences On Morality, Aesthetics, And Perception, Angelika Luiza Seidel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a series of experiments I examine extraneous factors that influence evaluative judgments and perception. Specifically, I focus on two kinds of evaluative states: moral evaluation and aesthetic evaluation. I use the domain of morality to explore the impact of emotions on moral value. I use the domain of art to explore influence of spatial features such as size and position, as well as attributions of fame of artist on aesthetic value. I show ways in which evaluation goes beyond the thing evaluated. I will in addition conclude with some exploratory work on valenced visual object recognition. This relates …

Development Of Authoring And Agency In Early Childhood Through Play, Pi-Chun Grace Ho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The recent national focus on universal early childhood education programs has drawn attention to the challenges of organizing learning contexts and practices in which children can thrive as learners and community members. Preparing children for school and improving the quality of early childhood education face limits, however, when the role of play is dismissed or reduced to merely instrumental activity. Framed in Vygotsky’s cultural-historical theory, Bakhtin’s dialogic approach, and Stetsenko’s transformative activist stance, I reframe play as a process of authoring that fuels children’s passion for being agentive actors in the world and their own lives. This approach addresses how …

Masculinity And Disproportionate Risk Of Contact With The Criminal Justice System: Findings From A Select Sample Of Low-Income Black Males In New York City, Michael G. Pass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Official statistics document that Black males experience disproportionate contact with the criminal justice system (CJS). Existing theory and research suggest that this contact may be attributed to unique attributes of Black masculine behavior. Utilizing a meta-analysis of Black masculinity studies and content analysis of narratives from a select sample of Black males, ages 19-50, the current study examines the similarities and differences between the construction and performance of normative or traditional masculinity, as measured by Mahalik et als’ CMNI and the attributes of Black masculinity as defined in the literature. A goal of the study was to assess whether Black …

Thresholds Of Atrocity: Liberal Violence And The Politics Of Moral Vision, Kristofer J. Petersen-Overton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

All political communities set normative limits to the acceptable use of force. A threshold of atrocity indicates the point at which acceptable violence meets the boundaries of the unacceptable. In liberal democratic states such norms are ostensibly set higher. Hence, there is a theoretical threshold to the modern state’s ability to act in ways that violate norms it claims to uphold. Paradoxically, thresholds of atrocity are almost never breached and unconscionable violence occurs regularly. This study seeks to explain the persistence of extreme violence by developing a theory of atrocity grounded in moral vision. Liberal democratic nation-states are able to …

Beyond Inclusion: Critical Race Theory And Participatory Budgeting, Celina Su

Publications and Research

Critical Race Theory (CRT) researchers maintain that mainstream liberal discourses of neutrality and colorblindness inherently reify existing patterns of inequality, and that privileging the voices of people of color and the marginalized is essential to addressing issues of equity and equality. Participatory budgeting (PB) aims, too, to include the voices of the marginalized in substantive policy-making. Through a CRT lens, I examine the ways in which the New York City PB process has thus far worked to simultaneously disrupt and maintain racial hierarchies. I pay particular attention to how social constructions of the “good project” shape the discourses around community …

From Porto Alegre To New York City: Participatory Budgeting And Democracy, Celina Su

Publications and Research

Because of its popularity, there is now a large literature examining how participatory budgeting (PB) deepens participation by the poor and redistributes resources. Closer examinations of recent cases of PB can help us to better understand the political configurations in which these new participatory democratic spaces are embedded, and articulate the conditions that might lead to more meaningful outcomes. Who participates? For whose benefit? The articles in this symposium, on participatory budgeting in New York City (PBNYC), highlight both strengths and challenges of the largest American PB process. They focus less on redistribution, more on the dimensions of the process …

Fitting-In: How Formerly Incarcerated New York City Black Men Define Success Post-Prison, Mika'il Deveaux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The problem of community reintegration emerged following the rise of the US prison population, which began in in the 1970s, disproportionately affecting US-born African American men. In this qualitative study, the researcher examined the perceptions of 17 formerly incarcerated New York City African American men to understand how they defined post-prison success after having been in the community at least three years in the wake of the era of mass (hyper) incarceration.

During the study, the researcher employed a constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006) approach using data from semi-structured interviews to identify factors that enabled these African American men to …

Words Of Change: How Linguistic Shifts Over The Course Of A Short-Term Exposure Therapy Represent Movement Towards Psychological Health, Zachary A. Kahn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exposure therapy is currently considered the “gold standard” in treating posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Though exposure therapy has been increasingly used and studied as an intervention for PTSD in recent years, little is known about the mechanisms of change in this type of treatment. The Trauma and Addiction Project at the City College of New York ran a clinical research trial for individuals with co-morbid PTSD and Substance Use Disorders (SUDs). Participants randomized into the experimental group, Concurrent Treatment with Prolonged Exposure (COPE), participated in a twelve-session therapeutic intervention that combined exposure therapy focused on the participant’s primary trauma with …

Dominance & Survivance: Urban Latino Communities And Education In Racial Neoliberal Urbanism, Edwin Mayorga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

U.S. Latino youth are as undereducated and underprepared today as they were in the 1960s, leading some to declare that there is a national “Latino education crisis” that is affecting the lives of millions. While this problem is national in scope there are multiple narratives that underpin this story. Of particular interest in this study is the intersection of urban Latino core communities and public schools. This dissertation is based on the Education in our Barrios Project, #BarrioEdProj, which is a digital, critical participatory action research study of urbanism and urban education in the Latino core community of East Harlem …

Great Power Politics In The Twenty-First Century: The Ukrainian Example, Oksana Byeha

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The rebirth of the Cold War threatens a potential nuclear crisis. This thesis draws attention to this danger if the ongoing US - Russian confrontation is ignored. Its main focus however is on the behavior of the Russian Federation: and how its domestic and foreign policies have contributed to this situation. The thesis consists of an introduction, two chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction provides a short history of the Cold War and a brief preface to the first chapter. Chapter I, Russia Versus the United States, focuses on the Western-Russian differences and the policies derived from this. In …

"Tough On Crime, Tough On The Causes Of Crime": Liberal Carceral Logics And The Reproduction Of Settler Colonial Violence In Winnipeg, Mb, Canada, Bronwyn Dobchuk-Land

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation illustrates how settler colonialism is reproduced in present-day Canada through the governance of crime, and how political struggles against policing, imprisonment, and colonialism are linked. It focuses on the politics of crime in the Province of Manitoba from 1999–2016, during which the left-of-center New Democratic Party (NDP) government engineered a significant expansion of the carceral state, overseeing unprecedented increases in policing and jail growth. In Manitoba, the vast majority of prisoners are Indigenous. This dissertation explores the logic through which the NDP integrated their support for policing and imprisonment into their “progressive” value system, packaging their carceral expansion …

A Randomized Controlled Pilot Trial Of Different Mobile Messaging Interventions For Problem Drinking, Frederick Muench, Katherine Van Stolk-Cooke, Alexis Kuerbis, Gertraud Stadler, Amit Baumel, Sijing Shao, James R. Mckay, Jon Morgenstern

Publications and Research

Introduction
Recent evidence suggests that text messaging may help to reduce problem drinking as an extension to in-person services, but very little is known about the effectiveness of remote messaging on problem drinking as a stand-alone intervention, or how different types of messages may improve drinking outcomes in those seeking to moderate their alcohol consumption.

Methods
We conducted an exploratory, single-blind randomized controlled pilot study comparing four different types of alcohol reduction-themed text messages sent daily to weekly drink self-tracking texts in order to determine their impact on drinking outcomes over a 12-week period in 152 participants (≈ 30 per …

Quantitative Analysis Of Opioids And Cannabinoids In Wastewater Samples, Alethea Jacox, Jillian Wetzel, Shu-Yuan Cheng, Marta Concheiro-Guisan

Publications and Research

Wastewater-based epidemiology is an innovative approach that uses the analysis of human excretion products in wastewater to obtain information about exposure to drugs in defined population groups. We developed and validated an analytical method for the simultaneous determination of opioids (morphine, oxycodone, hydrocodone, oxymorphone and hydromorphone), and cannabinoids (Δ⁹-tetrahydrocannabinol, 11-nor-9-carboxy-tetrahydrocannabinol (THCCOOH) and THCCOOH-glucuronide) in raw-influent wastewater samples by ultra-high performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry. Method validation included linearity (5–1 000 ng/L for opioids, 10–1 000 ng/L for cannabinoids), imprecision (<21.2%), accuracy (83%–131%), matrix effect (from –35.1% to –14.7%) and extraction efficiency (25%–84%), limit of detection (1–5 ng/L) and quantification (5–10 ng/L) and auto-sampler stability (no loss detected). River and wastewater samples were collected in triplicate from different locations in New York City and stored at −20 °C until analysis. Water from sewage overflow location tested positive for morphine (10.7 ng/L), oxycodone (4.2–23.5 ng/L), oxymorphone (4.8 ng/L) and hydromorphone (4.2 ng/L). Raw influent wastewater samples tested positive for morphine (133.0–258.3 ng/L), oxycodone (31.1–63.6 ng/L), oxymorphone (16.0–56.8 ng/L), hydromorphone (6.8–18.0 ng/L), hydrocodone (4.0–12.8 ng/L) and THCCOOH (168.2–772.0 ng/L). This method is sensitive and specific for opioids and marijuana determination in wastewater samples.

C.A.R.D.I.O. Evaluation Instructor's Key, Alexandra Hamlett, Meagan Lacy

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Creating Keywords Handout, Alexandra Hamlett, Meagan Lacy

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Research Log Handout, Alexandra Hamlett, Meagan Lacy

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Concept Map Example, Alexandra Hamlett, Meagan Lacy

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Student Reflection On Authority Handout, Alexandra Hamlett, Meagan Lacy

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

C.A.R.D.I.O. Evaluation Handout, Alexandra Hamlett, Meagan Lacy

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Brainstorming Your Research Topic Handout, Alexandra Hamlett, Meagan Lacy

Open Educational Resources

No abstract provided.

Griffiths Looks At The Way Movies Portray People., Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

Movies are in one way or another works of fiction even when they try to narrate reality. Yet movies can help us understand how society looks at people, places, and times, opening windows onto other worlds.

Dr. Alison Griffiths studies the ways that cinema forms those windows. A professor in the Department of Communication Studies in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College of the City University of New York, she has spent her entire professional career analyzing how movies represent realities.

The Use Of Physical Restraints In Long-Term Care In Spain: A Multi-Center Cross-Sectional Study, Gabriel J. Estévez-Guerra, Emilio Fariña-López, Eduardo Núñez-González, Manuel Gandoy-Crego, Fernando Calvo-Francés, Elizabeth Capezuti

Publications and Research

Background: Physical restraint is a procedure used frequently in long-term care. It is a controversial practice because its use is associated with numerous complications and also affects freedom and individual autonomy. The objective of this study was to examine the use of physical restraint of long-term care residents with the ability to move voluntarily.

Methods: We conducted a cross-sectional observational and correlational multi-center study. Nine centers agreed to participate. Of the 1,200 people present at the time of data collection, those without voluntary movement or in the facility for less than a month were excluded. Thus, the final sample was …

Reference Mode Preferences Of Community College And Four-Year College Students, John Carey, Ajatshatru Pathak

Publications and Research

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine the reference service mode preferences of community college (two-year) students and four-year college students.

Methods: The researchers administered a paper-based, face-to-face questionnaire at two institutions within the City University of New York system: Hunter College, a senior college, and Queensborough Community College, a two-year institution. During the summer of 2015, the researchers surveyed 79 participants, asking them to identify their most and least preferred medium for accessing library reference services.

Results: Nearly 75% of respondents expressed a preference for face-to-face reference, while only about 18% preferred remote reference services (online chat, …

Local Measures: The Need For Neighborhood-Level Data In Youth Violence Prevention Initiatives, Jeffrey A. Butts, Alana M. Henniger

Publications and Research

In an attempt to assist local jurisdictions with violence prevention, the U.S. Department of Justice and other federal agencies launched the National Forum on Youth Violence Prevention in 2010. More than a dozen cities participated in the National Forum, collaborating to increase the effectiveness of their local strategies for reducing youth violence. The Department of Justice asked John Jay College of Criminal Justice to monitor and assess the outcomes of the National Forum beginning in 2011. The study investigated the accomplishments and perceptions of the leadership networks in each city.

Persistent Amygdala Novelty Response Is Associated With Less Anterior Cingulum Integrity In Trauma-Exposed Women, Seungyeon A. Yoon, Mariann R. Weierich

Publications and Research

Objectives: We investigated the potential role of cingulum and uncinate fasciculus integrity in trauma-related neural hypervigilance, indexed by less discrimination between amygdala activation to novel and familiar affective images.

Participants: 22 women (mean age 21.7 ± 3.9 years) with a history of trauma, and 20 no-trauma controls (mean age 21.9 ± 4.8 years).

Measures: Trauma exposure and trauma-related symptoms were assessed during structured clinical interview. White matter integrity in the anterior cingulum, parahippocampal cingulum, and uncinate fasciculus was measured using diffusion weighted imaging. Amygdala response to novel and familiar affective scenes was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Results: Trauma-exposed …