Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

This Is What A Feminist Tweets Like: "Women's Language" And Styling Activist Identities In A #Yesallwomen Twitter Corpus, Eleanor A. Morikawa

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents results of a study of linguistic practice in the context of feminist activism on Twitter. Twitter has become a primary medium for social and political activism and a rich venue for study of the relationship between digitally mediated language and identity production. The focus of this study is the viral Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen, a hashtag that rose in popularity following a misogyny-motivated terrorist attack in the spring of 2014. This dissertation treats the #YesAllWomen hashtag as an imagined space and a Discourse (Gee, 2015) where language serves as a site for the production of gender and feminist …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Afro-Cuba Transnational: Recordings And The Mediation Of Afro-Cuban Traditional Music, Johnny Frias

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the way audio and video recordings and the internet have impacted, shaped, and helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene. My focus will be on the most popular and widely-recorded genres of Afro-Cuban music—rumba and the religious repertoire of Santería, particularly batá drumming—both of which I also perform regularly with other Cuban musicians in Miami. Incorporating interviews, online ethnographic research, and participant-observation as a musician, my research has three main arguments.

First, recordings of Afro-Cuban music helped create a transnational Afro-Cuban music scene by increasing the popularity of these traditions outside of Cuba, including their amateur performance …

Demographic Factors As Domains For Adaptation In Linguistic Preprocessing, Sara Morini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Classic natural language processing resources such as the Penn Treebank (Marcus et al. 1993) have long been used both as evaluation data for many linguistic tasks and as training data for a variety of off-the-shelf language processing tools. Recent work has highlighted a gender imbalance in the authors of this text data (Garimella et al. 2019) and hypothesized that tools created with such resources will privilege users from particular demographic groups (Hovy and Søgaard 2015). Domain adaptation is typically employed as a strategy in machine learning to adjust models trained and evaluated with data from different genres. However, the present …

Some Non-Human Languages Of Thought, Nicolas J. Porot

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What might we learn if we take seriously the possibility of non-human Languages of Thought (LoT)? A LoT is a combinatorial set of mental representations. And, since mental representations and rules of combination vary in kind, there are many possible LoTs. Simple LoTs might lack familiar features of the putative human LoT, such as object representations, recursively defined rules of combination, sentential connectives, or predicate-argument structure. The most familiar arguments for the existence of LoTs, such as those from productivity, systematicity, concept learning, and perceptual computation, all fail when applied to non-human animals. But recent empirical evidence motivates attributing LoTs …

Sounds Of Alter-Destiny And Ikonoklast Panzerist Fabulations, Mette Christiansen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study is a multifaceted attempt to complicate ideas about study, to think about the critical potential and social implications of certain kinds of stories, and how we might effectively disrupt and reinvent notions and techniques of critique and resistance in the names of hope and social transformation. It looks at the creative practices of Jazz musician and other-worldly being Sun Ra, the dual philosophies of “Ikonoklast Panzerism” and “Gothic Futurism” of an artist known as Rammellzee, and the concept-engineering of theorist and artist Kodwo Eshun, in an attempt to think through how radically unconventional forms of study might make …

The Development And Validation Of An Ideal Point Measure Of Work Engagement, Michael M. Denunzio

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Work engagement has been an extremely popular area of research and practice over the past two decades. However, organizational scholars have yet to thoughtfully consider alternative and potentially more appropriate ways of modeling how individuals report their work engagement and, relatedly, measuring the construct. This dissertation seeks to establish and support the position that (1) individuals use an ideal point (vs. dominance) process to identify how engaged they are and respond to work engagement items, and (2) an ideal point framework can be used to develop a construct valid work engagement scale with good psychometric properties. Since no such scale …

Exploring Political Action And Socialization Through Group Improvisation Within The Music Of Frederic Rzewski And Cornelius Cardew, Marcel Rominger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late 1960s, socialist composers, Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, each established ensembles with the purpose of performing works consisting of experimental forms of improvisation. By employing group improvisation, and including untrained, non-musicians within their performances, they strove to use these ensembles as a model for society itself; this model includes a dissolution of the hierarchy among performers and the barrier between performer and audience. Improvisation helped music resist commodification by the culture industry or appropriation by authoritarian regimes for the purpose of propaganda. This dissertation aims to explore how Cardew and Rzewski constituted effective socialization and political action …

Class Matters: School Affluence And Other Predictors Of Attainment For Wealthy And Poor Students, Alison Brockhouse

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Public schools in the United States are becoming increasingly segregated by socioeconomic status. Though the educational consequences of socioeconomic segregation are well researched, segregation is often ignored or exacerbated by education reform. To learn more about the wider implications of socioeconomic segregation, this study utilizes theoretical frameworks derived from Max Weber’s theory of social stratification to analyze over 10,000 students’ experiences from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) Education Longitudinal Study (ELS) 2002, 2004, and 2012 waves of data collection. More specifically, this research explores the impact of attending an affluent high school on long-term educational attainment. It finds …

Emotion Processing Deficits In Psychopathy: Does Cueing To Relevant Facial Features Increase Cognitive And Emotional Empathy?, Shawn E. Fagan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Psychopathy is a multifaceted disorder characterized by a lack of cognitive and emotional empathy. The traditional model of psychopathy divides the disorder into two factors: Factor 1 consists of the interpersonal and affective traits of psychopathy while Factor 2 measures antisocial behaviors and lifestyle choices. The attention-to-the-eyes hypothesis argues that psychopathic individuals have impaired emotion recognition (specifically for fear) due to deficits in orienting attention to salient facial features like the eyes. Psychopathic individuals also display blunted autonomic responding to emotional stimuli, though whether this is due to attention-orienting deficits remains to be clarified. The present project investigated whether empathy-related …

Facial Identification: A Meta-Analysis Of 50 Years Of Research, Jungwon Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current research built a comprehensive database that includes over 1,000 facial identification studies published in the last five decades. Using this database, two research questions, which are crucial for better understanding facial identification performance, were examined. The questions are 1) how variables influence facial identification performance, and 2) whether findings from facial identification research can be generalized across study types. Topically focused effect-size analyses and study characteristic analyses demonstrated that, among the 38 variables investigated in the current meta-analysis, stimulus alteration and participants’ age produced larger effects on identification performance than other variables. Results from aggregated effect-size analyses supported …

The Role Of The Direct And Indirect Basal Ganglia Pathways In The Learning, Performance, And Goal-Directed Control Of Action Sequences, Eric Garr

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Animals engage in intricately woven action sequences that are constructed from trial-and-error learning, but the mechanisms by which the brain links together individual actions which are later recalled as fluid chains of behavior are not fully understood. The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the learning and goal-directed control of action sequences in rats. Experiment 1 addresses a question that comes out of a reinforcement learning model of action sequencing: how does the extent of training change how the performance of an action sequence is impacted by reward devaluation. The data show that action sequences remain goal-directed overall regardless …

Subjective Experience Of Autonomy And Psychological Well-Being: A Cross-Cultural Study With Korean American And European American Young Adults, Esther J. Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aimed to explore whether parenting beliefs and practices that might promote academic or professional achievements also undermine aspects of psychological well-being. Specifically, the study focused on the relationship between the experience of subjective autonomy and psychological well-being measured in terms of self-esteem, flourishing, and life satisfaction. The sample consisted of 86 second-generation Korean Americans (KAs) and 99 European Americans (EAs) ages 25-35. Perceived parental autonomy support (versus psychological control) and perceived parental modernity (versus traditionalism) were also examined for group differences and associations with psychological well-being. As a group, KAs perceived greater parental psychological control and parental traditionalism …

Impact Of Religiosity And Level Of Acculturation On Cultural Alignment: An Exploration Of Terror Management Mechanisms Among Muslim American Women, Farah T. Goheer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

Impact of Religiosity and Level of Acculturation on Cultural Alignment: An Exploration of Terror Management Mechanisms among Muslim American Women

by

Farah Taha Goheer, M.A.

Advisor: Joel Sneed, Ph.D.

Background: Terror management theory (TMT) is based upon the notion that human beings require ongoing psychological protection from the unyielding, existential threat of death. A large body of evidence has shown that human beings manage death-related terror by aligning with and endorsing the dominant views of their cultural worldviews. Notably, as immigrants experience a new culture, worldviews become rearticulated to incorporate elements of host and heritage cultures. However, it is …

Tensions, Dilemmas, And Radical Possibility In Democratizing Teacher Unions: Stories Of Two Social Justice Caucuses In New York City And Philadelphia, Chloe Asselin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the tensions, dilemmas, and radical possibilities faced by two social justice caucuses in democratizing their teacher unions: the Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE) in New York City and the Caucus of Working Educators (WE) in Philadelphia. It asks: What radical possibilities and structural constraints are generated and/or illuminated by educator activists in MORE and WE? To frame the research, this dissertation examines the historical, political, economic, and social contexts in which the caucuses exist and the daily realities that they face; provides an overview of educational and union politics in New York City and Philadelphia; and analyzes …

A Deep-Er Practice For Educators: Reflecting, Unpacking And Confronting Racism Through Critical Performative Pedagogy, Natalia Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the current political climate, we have seen time and time again the killings of black and brown youth, witnessed the separation of immigrant families, and the mass murders caused by nativist xenophobic white rage. Teachers in schools across our country need to be better prepared to engage in critical race dialogues and need to understand their location in the larger educational system so to contest, rather than reproduce, racism. This study is based on the premise that teachers are not adequately learning about structural oppression that impact the experience of school children and are not trained in the art …

Dios En Carne: Rastafari And The Embodiment Of Spiritual Blackness In Puerto Rico, Omar Ramadan-Santiago

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In my dissertation, I examine how the Rastafari community in Puerto Rico constructs, reshapes, imagines and embodies blackness as a personal, political, and ideological identity. I argue that my interlocutors refuse non-black privilege and choose blackness, an act that is understood as identification not with subjugation but with power. I consider their identification with blackness and enactment of this identity as a performance. My analysis, based on 22 months of ethnographic research, and utilizing ethnography, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews, explores how my interlocutors claim blackness as a spiritual identity. In doing so, they demonstrate the metaphysical nature of race …

Internal And External Attention In Autism Spectrum Disorder, Tehila Eilam-Stock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a pervasive neurodevelopmental condition affecting individuals throughout the lifespan. Sensory hypersensitivity and superior perceptual acuity are well documented in individuals with ASD, and may indicate heightened orientation of attention to external stimuli, as attention can augment sensory perception. Recent evidence from mind-wandering research suggests that the ability to disengage attention from the external environment and direct it internally to self-generated mentation is crucial for adaptive cognition and behavior, as it allows for incorporation of past knowledge and experience in the interpretation of novel situations. We hypothesized that ASD is related to an imbalance between externally …

‘Its Something You Do Bro’: Language And Identity On A Male Erotic Hypnosis Messageboard, Eric Chambers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Drawing on a seven-year corpus of data (total words N = 86,881) on a publicly-accessible messageboard on which self-identified gay men discuss their experiences undergoing erotic hypnosis, this study applies Critical Discourse Analysis methods to understand how posters understand their sexual identities and those of others. This study identifies the emergence of two main identity-types at-play on OnYourKnees: the jock and the coach. Jocks are generally characterized by a focus on sports and body-consciousness, a disinterest or inability to engage in scholarly/academic pursuits, and a desire to be submissive to others to achieve sexual pleasure. Coaches, on the other hand, …

Structure And Function Of Dopamine In The Inner Ear And Auditory Efferent System Of A Vocal Fish, Jonathan T. Perelmuter

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The neuromodulator dopamine is considered essential for coordinating the internal motivational state of an organism with appropriate behavioral responses to stimuli in the external environment. This could be accomplished by modifying the function of neural circuits involved in sensory processing such that they are “tuned in” and optimally sensitive to important stimuli during critical time windows. While dopamine modulation of auditory processing has been studied in the central nervous system, neuromodulation can also occur outside the brain, in the inner ear. The majority of investigations of dopamine in the ear are conducted using rodents and focus on its role in …

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

Market Making: Crises And The Global Production Of Shipbreaking In Chittagong, Bangladesh, Elizabeth A. Sibilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shipbreaking is a dismantling process with a primary objective of extracting large amounts of steel from ocean-going vessels, oil tankers, bulk cargo carriers, and container ships. As mobile forms of fixed capital, these devalued vessels have experienced a gradual or sudden loss of value. The removal of devalued ships from the world fleet, through an increasingly sophisticated global demolition market and expanding domestic shipbreaking markets, have played a critical role in helping the global shipping sector solve its crises of overproduction since the mid 1970s. Since the early 1990s Bangladesh has become one of the most important domestic shipbreaking markets. …

Components Of Fluency-Based Instruction In The College Classroom, Jennifer Kourassanis Velasquez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The current research regarding the use of fluency-based instruction (FBI) to teach academic skills suggests the addition of FBI to traditional instruction produces better learning outcomes than traditional instruction alone. However, there is a lack of comparative research of the addition of FBI to traditional instruction vs. traditional instruction alone on student performance outcomes with college students. The present study was composed of two experiments to examine the effects of the addition of a component of FBI using a modified SAFMEDS (Say All Fast Minute Every Day Shuffled) strategy to traditional instruction within the course’s existing curriculum on quiz and …

Rails To Revolution: Railroads, Railroad Workers And The Geographies Of The Mexican Revolution, Hector Agredano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a historical geography of the role of railroads and railroad workers in the Mexican Revolution. It shows that despite the presence of railroads in the popular imagination of the Mexican Revolution, the role of railroads and railroad workers themselves remains largely missing from scholarly accounts of the conflict. I argue that railroad workers were central to the revolutionary process from its beginning, and I demonstrate that their close relationship to a critically important transportation network allowed them to intervene at crucial moments of the revolutionary process. Undoubtedly, this relationship to transportation networks also had a formative impact …

Poems To Open Palms: Praise Performance And The State In The Sultanate Of Oman, Bradford J. Garvey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the musical constitution of moral, economic, material, and social relations between rural communities and the state in the Sultanate of Oman. I argue that communities embedded within the authoritarian state hegemony of the Sultanate form and affirm social relations with the state through its embodied proxy, Sultan Qābūs bin Ṣa‘īd Āl Bū Ṣa‘īd, via the reciprocal exchange of state-directed giving and praise poetry responses. The circuit of exchange catalyzes the social production of political legitimacy and ensures continued generous distribution by mythopoetically presenting such cyclicity as resulting from elite and non-elite mutuality. This praise poetry is rendered …

Behavioral Effects Of Restrictive Housing On Prisoners, Mijin Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Restrictive housing (RH) is a complicated and controversial management tool used by local, state, and federal correctional agencies. Unlike previous studies that predominantly examined the psychological harms of restrictive housing placement, this study aims to extend the understanding of the use of restrictive housing, the conditions and specific utility of restrictive housing, and how such use can impact inmates’ subsequent behavioral outcomes or misconducts inside of the correctional facility. Restrictive housing data from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections (PADOC) was used to identify the differential impact of different types of restrictive housing (i.e., administrative, disciplinary, and protective RH) through a …

Rich In Needs: The Forgotten Radical Politics Of The Welfare Rights Movement, Wilson Sherwin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Situated temporally between the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement, the Welfare Rights Movement of the 1960s and 70s distinguished itself by its militant critique of waged labor. Returning to the movement’s archives I examine how the mostly poor, Black, female participants developed their “antiwork politics”, how they asserted their right to live not only meager but occasionally luxurious lives—demanding not only bread but also roses. In the courts, streets, welfare offices, department stores, policy proposals, and numerous internal debates, these women waged national battles to assert full autonomy over their families, consumption, sexuality, and their own time.

As …

The Social Cost Of Pain: Rejection Sensitivity, Social Rejection, And Cannabis Use In Young Adults, Naomi Dambreville

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cannabis has been implicated in relieving distress and social pain, an important area of research in young adult samples, given the saliency of peer and social networks to addiction. Cannabis, via opioid pathways, has been shown to reduce, or potentially buffer, the effects of social pain and rejection. Thus, cannabis may be protective against the painful feelings of social stress, particularly for heavier or more frequent users. However, findings are not wholly positive, as other research indicates cannabis may blunt affective responses and impair social processing. The effects of cannabis use in young adults are understudied, as well as its …

Do It Like A Syntactician: Using Binary Gramaticality Judgements To Train Sentence Encoders And Assess Their Sensitivity To Syntactic Structure, Pablo Gonzalez Martinez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The binary nature of grammaticality judgments and their use to access the structure of syntax are a staple of modern linguistics. However, computational models of natural language rarely make use of grammaticality in their training or application. Furthermore, developments in modern neural NLP have produced a myriad of methods that push the baselines in many complex tasks, but those methods are typically not evaluated from a linguistic perspective. In this dissertation I use grammaticality judgements with artificially generated ungrammatical sentences to assess the performance of several neural encoders and propose them as a suitable training target to make models learn …

Caring Without Sharing: Philanthropy's Creation And Destruction Of The Common World, Amy B. Schiller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores multiple ways philanthropy builds and undermines the common world. Political science treatments of philanthropy have focused mainly on its role in the development of civil society, with a recent turn towards critiques of philanthropy as an instrument of elite power and tension between private wealth and democratic governance. In this dissertation, I examine how philanthropy can foster enduring spaces of human flourishing, or reduce beneficiaries to objects of pity, surveillance and domination. I trace philanthropy's evolution from ancient to contemporary contexts and propose a framework for philanthropy to, under certain conditions, build and care for the common …