Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

New York State Excelsior Scholarship Program: A Post-Implementation Analysis Of Student Success, Eligibility, And Indebtedness – An Intersectional Study Of Black And White Female Students, Marcus I. Richardson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The New York State (NYS) Excelsior Scholarship Program, introduced in 2017, was designed as a “first-in-the-nation” tuition-free initiative intended to expand college affordability for undergraduate students attending public institutions in New York State. While the program aims to increase access to higher education, its eligibility requirements, particularly the expectation that students complete 30 credits annually through continuous full-time enrollment, may disadvantage students whose academic pathways diverge from traditional enrollment patterns. This study examined the relationship between structural, financial, and academic factors and students’ ability to retain Excelsior Scholarship eligibility at the City University of New York (CUNY). Using institutional data …

An Inferential Analysis Of Lexical Networks, Christopher D. Gravelle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Lexical networks are graphs where words are treated as nodes, and relations between words are treated as edges. The adoption of lexical networks in psycholinguistics is impeded by a lack of readily available inferential methods, which limits work to purely descriptive analyses with little ability to make inferences about what variables account for lexical network structure. The current research explores the use of latent space network models as a method for analyzing lexical networks. Latent space network models are latent variable regression models, which model the presence or strength of edges by estimating pairwise distances between nodes in a latent …

Goddess In A Trash Can: Religious Ritual Disposal In New York City Public Parks, Zoe Oro-Hahn

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Practitioners of Afro-Caribbean religions, including Santería, Vodou, Espiritismo, and Las 21 Divisiones, utilize the New York City Public Parks system to hold rituals, connect with spirits and ancestors, and dispose of religious remains leftover from trabajos (workings) and brujería (witchcraft). Utilizing photos from Van Cortlandt Park in the Bronx, my thesis considers the religious, political, social, and practical rationale behind this phenomenon, explores the rituals occurring, and provides policy suggestions that balance religious needs of practitioners with the safety and wellbeing of New York City’s parks.

Assessing The Influence Of Disability Views On Perceptions Of Hearing Aids Among Older Korean Adults, Stasha Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Background

Age-related hearing loss, also known as presbycusis, is highly prevalent among older adults, yet hearing aid adoption remains low, in part due to concerns about stigma and negative social perceptions. This study aimed to examine whether attitudes towards disabilities influence perceptions of individuals wearing hearing aids among older Korean adults. It also explored the potential effects of cultural identity and the age of the individual wearing the hearing aid on these perceptions.

Methods

Ten participants completed the Attitudes and Perspectives on Persons with Disabilities (APPD) questionnaire and rated 8 different images of individuals (one younger male and one older …

Reimagining Puerto Rican Sonic Identity: Musical Style And Creation After Hurricane María., Gabriel E. Bouche Caro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the manifestation of Puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Rican identity) in concert music composed after Hurricane María (2017), a catastrophe that catalyzed a profound shift in Puerto Rico's cultural consciousness. Focusing on four composers whose early careers were shaped by this period—Johanny Navarro, John Rivera Pico, Iván E. Rodríguez, and Christian Quiñones—the study combines close readings of scores and recordings with extensive original interviews to understand how musical identity is constructed in the wake of collective trauma. The analysis reveals that while the composers share a generational bond, their aesthetic practices are strikingly diverse: Navarro preserves Afro-Caribbean rhythmic structures, Rivera …

Alive And Thriving: Ancestral Wisdom Usage Among Us Based Latine Clinical Social Workers In Psychotherapy Practice, Yaneth Lombana

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At a time when the United States is rolling back protections to vulnerable communities, this dissertation investigates experiences of Latine clinical social workers in New York and New Jersey as it relates to the intersection of ancestral wisdom and their profession. It addresses how Latine clinical social workers, who incorporate ancestral wisdom in their practice determine when, with which clients and with which methods to do so. This work advances current scholarship on how clinical social workers can combat racism and white supremacy. It highlights resistance practices that have been critical in keeping people indigenous to colonized lands alive and …

Elite Manipulation Of Accountability Institutions: A Comparative Analysis Of Cicig And Maccih, Kevin E. Contreras

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Strong accountability institutions are expected to limit elite manipulation. Yet elites continue to manipulate them. This paper shows that strong accountability institutions are insufficient to prevent elite manipulation. A comparative analysis of Honduras (MACCIH) and Guatemala (CICIG) traces the relationship between institutional strength and elite manipulation. The findings indicate that this relationship is contingent on context. Preventing manipulation would require accountability institutions to sustain greater mobilization and institutional leverage than elites. Accountability institutions alone are insufficient to achieve this condition.

Neural Correlates Of Recognition Memory And Metamemory In Breast Cancer Survivors: An Event-Related Potential Study, Dishari Zaman Azad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Breast cancer survivors (BCS) often report noticeable cognitive difficulties despite showing limited impairment on standardized neuropsychological tests. Some have theorized that this is simply an insensitivity of standardized testing to subtle cognitive changes (test-insensitivity hypothesis), whereas others have suggested there are early neural changes that are detected by patients but precede detection by these tests (early signal hypothesis) or that when they achieve normal performance, it is through saliently effortful compensatory processes (compensation hypothesis). The present study tested these theories by assessing metamemory and recognition memory retrieval in BCS and non-cancer controls (NCC) using both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) …

A Hot Topic:
Congressional Polarization And Climate Change, Mercedes R.P. Wilby

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scholars offer competing explanations for how congressional polarization develops and operates. The literature variously points to shifting agendas, procedural change, or member adaptation or replacement. In this project, I study how congressional polarization occurs by asking what mechanisms account for the emergence of climate policy polarization. Climate policy is a useful test case to evaluate these competing theories. As a relatively low-salience, highly technical issue that is neither new nor inherently ideological, it is not an obvious candidate for deep partisan division. Yet climate policy has become sharply polarized, extending partisan disagreement even to the underlying science.

In order to …

Access Denied: Financial Aid Inequalities And The Economic Impact On Daca Students, Teresa D. Jordan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project argues that financial aid policies in the United States create a system of structural inequality that systematically denies Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients’ equitable access to higher education. Drawing on peer-reviewed scholarship, federal policy data, and large-scale survey research, this paper demonstrates how the categorical exclusion from federal financial aid, inconsistent in-state tuition laws, and recurring DACA renewal fees form an interlocking barrier with profound psychological and economic consequences for a population that is deeply integrated into American society. These compounding barriers force students into a framework of constrained rationality, distorting their academic major choices …

Implicit Attitudes Toward Hearing Aid Visibility: Conspicuous Versus Inconspicuous Hearing Aid Colors, Orly R. Ames

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Hearing aid stigma remains a significant barrier to treatment uptake, with device visibility frequently identified as a contributing factor. Although prior research has examined visibility in relation to hearing aid size and style, the role of color as a distinct aesthetic dimension has not been systematically investigated. The present study assessed whether hearing aid color affects implicit and explicit attitudes toward hearing aids and whether such evaluations differ across contexts. Twenty-six adults who were not current hearing aid users participated in an online quantitative multi-method study consisting of an Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report questionnaires. The IAT measured implicit …

Enhancing Ecological Validity In Speech-In-Noise Testing: Integrating Virtual Reality For A Multisensory Audiological Experience, Paulina Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the remarkable advances in hearing healthcare technology, the speech recognition tests used in routine clinical audiological assessment have remained essentially the same for decades.  Monosyllabic word recognition tests in quiet, such as the Northwestern University Auditory Test No. 6 (NU-6; Tillman & Carhart, 1966), have served as the audiology field’s default measure of speech understanding.  Modern speech-in-noise (SIN) tests, such as the QuickSIN (Killion et al., 2004), have emerged, yet they remain auditory-only, leaving an unignorable gap between what clinical tests measure and how patients communicate in daily life.  The present study examined whether pairing a standard SIN test …

Covert Scrambling To The Edge In Tshangla: An Analysis Of Wh- In-Situ, Tshering Y. Dorji

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis investigates the syntactic derivation of wh- in-situ constructions in Tshangla, an understudied Tibeto-Burman language of Bhutan. Argument wh-items can remain in-situ in islands—including sentential subjects, adjunct clauses, relative clauses, and coordinate structures—while projecting their scope to the matrix level. This island-insensitivity for certain wh-items suggests a lack of movement in the narrow syntax, yet diagnostic tests, including crossover effects, reconstruction effects, and parasitic gap licensing, provide compelling evidence for a movement-based account. I propose an analysis involving covert LF scrambling to the left edge of an island clause. This movement is driven by semantic requirements …

Gramsci’S ‘Democratic Philosopher’ And The Concept’S Foundations In Marxian Social Ontology, Eli Recht-Appel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis deals with the term ‘democratic philosopher’ from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In order to lay the groundwork for my distinct interpretation of the ‘democratic philosopher,’ I begin by providing an overview of Gramsci’s theory of the role of intellectuals in civil and political society. I then argue that the ‘democratic philosopher’ emerges from Gramsci’s typology of intellectuals but is a category which is both temporally and ontologically distinct from his more well-known concept of ‘organic intellectuals.’ ‘Organic intellectuals,’ intellectuals who co-develop alongside their fundamental social group or class, occupy a variety of cultural and political roles in …

Reducing The Complexity Of The Experimental Design Attenuates Trait-Level Effects In Threat Safety Discrimination Learning, Justin M. Lazzarino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trait measures of negative emotionality have sometimes been shown to play a role in shaping threat learning, but findings are mixed. For example, Johnson et al (2023) showed that the inhibitory and prospective subscales of the Intolerance for Uncertainty Scale (IUS) were associated with diminished and enhanced threat-safety discrimination, respectively, during the acquisition phase of a Pavlovian fear conditioning task. This finding was subsequently replicated in an independent sample (Kinney-Petrucha, 2024, unpublished). However, these findings and other trait-level fear acquisition effects have not been consistently observed in the broader fear learning literature. Variation in the complexity of or uncertainty inherent …

Semi-Peripheral Whiteness In A Global City: Central And Eastern European Women In Dubai, Hana Rubenstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone examines how Central and Eastern European (CEE) women navigate professional mobility in Dubai and asks to what extent Dubai enables them to bypass the post-socialist stigma attached to their semi-peripheral European identity. Situated at the intersection of migration studies, gender, and critical scholarship on semi-peripheral whiteness, the study addresses the limited attention paid to CEE women as economic actors outside European contexts, where they are often either absorbed into the category of “Western expatriates” or reduced to highly gendered stereotypes. Grounded in a qualitative, interpretivist approach, the study combines digital discourse analysis of 50 publicly accessible LinkedIn profiles …

Essays On Health And Immigration Policy, Selen Ozdogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two essays in applied microeconomics, each examining how individuals and institutions respond to policy changes. Both essays leverage natural experiments and recent advances in difference-in-differences estimation to identify causal effects. Both also speak to a common theme in public policy: the gap between intended and actual consequences of government intervention, and the role that policy design plays in shaping those consequences.

The first essay examines the impact of state-level e-cigarette excise taxes on nicotine and tobacco exposure among adults aged 18 and older. A central contribution is its use of individual-level panel biomarker data from urine …

Urban Sacred Grove: A Visioning For Collective Care, Preservation, Environmental Justice, And Resilience, Oluwadara A. Ojugbele

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My capstone explores how the concept of sacred groves—a community-based practice of conserving forest areas for cultural, spiritual, or religious purposes—can be reimagined as a framework for urban environmental stewardship and community care. Sacred groves have historically varied across time and place but consistently serve as protected spaces that honor divine forces, ancestors, and community values. In the Yoruba context, groves demarcate lush forests as abodes for oriṣas (divine forces) and spiritual beings, often containing shrines and artifacts that embody cultural beliefs. My capstone draws on the sacred grove concept and aims to illustrate how urban communities might adopt sacred …

Race And The Enduring Logic Of Exclusion In U.S. Immigration Policy, 1882–2025, Kejda Nikollaj

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines how immigration law in the United States has historically functioned as an instrument of racial exclusion and argues that this logic continues to shape contemporary policy and enforcement. Although overtly racist laws such as the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) or the National Origins Act (1924) have long been repealed, their underlying rationales and structures continue to survive under the modern language of legality, security, and national interest. This study argues that restrictive immigration policies tend to emerge when racial and social insecurities intersect, allowing old hierarchies to be revived under new legal justifications. Through a comparative historical …

Erosion And Accretion: Mobilities Of Sand, People, And Memory At Queer Riis Beach, Jah Elyse Sayers

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The People’s Beach at Jacob Riis Park on the Rockaway Peninsula of Queens, New York, is a vibrant place of queer and trans public-space placemaking—and especially Black and working class queer and trans placemaking. A distinct queer ecology emerges in the interplay of the dynamic movement of the barrier island, queer and trans—especially queer and trans Afro-diasporic—mobilities. This queer ecology, while articulated with, also defies and exceeds logics and workings of private property. In response to a convergence of pressures on Black, queer, trans, and working-class placemaking on the beach site in the 2020s, beachgoers have mobilized longstanding provisional socialities …

G&P2p: A Multi-Source Approach To Grapheme To Phoneme Conversion, Chun-Yi Peng

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis introduces G&P2P, a multi-source framework for grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion that integrates side pronunciations from multiple lexical resources. Unlike traditional single-source approaches, G&P2P fuses data from multi-sourced pronunciation dictionaries—including CELEX, PronLex, NETTalk, and WikiPron—through several fusion strategies. The goal is to improve model performance on out-of-vocabulary words through multi-source learning. Experiments were conducted with attentive LSTM, pointer-generator LSTM, and pointer-generator Transformer architectures. Models were trained on combinations of datasets and evaluated using word error rate (WER) across five random seeds.

Results show that fusing expert-curated dictionaries such as CELEX and PronLex consistently improves accuracy, achieving an 11.81-point absolute error …

Kanak-Ish Misfits: Queer Imaginaries, Racialized Borders, And The Politics Of Care In Berlin, Germany, Faruk Seref

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines queer Muslim experiences of border politics, racialization, and care in Berlin, Germany. By formulating bordering as a domineering and oppressive practice of boundary-making, I study how global bordering mechanisms shape and disrupt structures of care, caring, and being cared for. With an intersectional focus on race, gender, sexuality, and sex, I argue that borders are simultaneously materialized and challenged in varying localities, including the nightclub, the queer scene, the diasporic neighborhoods, and households. Ultimately, viewing collective care as fundamental to survival, healing, resistance, and building non-punitive lifeworlds, I theorize the counter-hegemonic practices of queers of color through …

A Predictive Coding Account Of Spatial Working Memory Following Prophylactic Levetiracetam Administration Prior To Traumatic Brain Injury, Omeima Mutwali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) symptom prevention and remediation is an important area of research that would benefit vulnerable groups, including active-duty and veteran soldiers. These patients can sustain penetrative forces in fields of combat or in training, which result in focal lesions that trigger inflammatory and degenerative processes in the brain. Both primary and secondary injuries are associated with changes to cognition, behavior and affective state. This disease poses increased risk of epileptogenesis, as well. Given these outcomes, prior research has evaluated levetiracetam (LEV) as a prophylactic treatment for seizures, cognitive deficits and negative emotionality. LEV acts as a presynaptic …

Policing Sex Trafficking: 'They’Re Never Taught, You Know', Anila S. Duro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research shows that victims of sex trafficking are most likely to first come in contact with the police (Baldwin et al, 2011; Twigg, 2017) and at times police have not been able to categorize cases of prostitution as trafficking even when trafficking elements were very clear (Dank et al, 2017; Dempsey, 2017; Farrell & Cronin, 2015). Despite the legal definition of trafficking, the terms prostitution, sex work, and sex trafficking are sometimes used interchangeably by law enforcement, whereas at other times, these words refer to different sets of circumstances and have different criminalization outcomes.  Research in this area is limited …

The Evolution Of U.S. Geoeconomic Grand Strategy Toward China And South Korea’S Strategic Space: A Comparative Analysis Of Neomercantilist Types In The Trump And Biden Administrations, Hyungbo Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the evolutionary trajectory of U.S. geoeconomic grand strategy toward China from the inauguration of the first Trump administration in 2017, through the Biden administration, to the second Trump administration launched in 2025, while exploring South Korea’s survival strategies in response. The findings confirm that U.S. foreign economic policy has radicalized into "Expanded Malevolent Neomercantilism," which moves beyond simple protectionism to weaponize global economic networks in the name of national security and exploit even allies.

According to the analysis, the U.S. progressed from the "Malevolent Neomercantilism" of Trump's first term, which focused on trade deficits, to the "Developmental …

Investigating Individual And Group Level Mediators Of Fear Acquisition, Rachel S. Lese

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The ability to discriminate between cues predictive of threat vs. safety (fear acquisition) and subsequently update fear responding when contingencies change (fear extinction) is crucial to survival for all organisms. While these processes have been the subject of intense experimental scrutiny for several decades, most human fear learning studies have focused primarily on extinction learning and fear recovery processes, with less focus on fear acquisition itself. Indeed, researchers typically aim to minimize variability during fear acquisition in order to rule out differences in extinction being driven by variability during the initial learning phase. Thus, experimental protocols are often optimized to …

The New York City Fields Of Calcio Libero: Where Protagonists Activate Counter-Hegemony, Olivia Soderini

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Derivative from a deeply rooted calcio (“football”/ “soccer”) passion, with years of associated empiricism in diverse contexts, as well as from a profound intellectual interest in examining (im)migratory trends through interdisciplinary lenses, stems the development of this project’s topical focus and multi-dimensional argument. My calcio experiences, further combined with my interest in and knowledge of political and critical theory, served as the converged impetus of recognizing what already exists and is thriving: (im)migrant protagonism and counter-hegemony by way of New York City (“NYC”) calcio libero.[1] This project embarks on a creative autoethnographic and analytical journey to explore pickup’s …

A Simulation To Compare Models For A Longitudinal Ordinal Response With A Multilevel Cross-Classified Data Structure, Rachel S. Perlin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This is a simulation study that compares four models for analyzing three-level longitudinal cross-classified data with an ordinal outcome, treatment effect and a category-specific effect. The models include the cumulative model, the sequential model, the adjacent category model, and a metric model. Data were generated for each of the first three models with 27,000 generated datasets each, totaling 81,000. The datasets vary along three continuous variables: the number of level-3 units, the ratio of treatment groups to control groups, and the treatment effect size. The outcome has four ordinal response categories. Each model had two predictor variables: treatment and time. …

Counterinsurgency In Afghanistan: Doctrine, Implementation, Cannibalization, Noah S. Fischer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Taliban return to power in Afghanistan on August 15th, 2021, is a watershed moment in the 21^st century history of the United States of America. The swift collapse of the U.S. backed Afghan government shocked American politicians, military leadership, and the general public. To many, trillions of dollars were wasted in funding a government that could not even survive a month without U.S. troops. But those dollars were used by U.S. military leadership to implement a new and innovative strategy those same leaders thought would guarantee success: counterinsurgency, abbreviated as COIN. In this thesis, I will ask: what …

Gathering Knowledge, Sustaining Science: The Female Forager And American Mushroom Culture, 1880–1930, Madeline S. Dede-Panken

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Unearthing origins of modern mycophilia, this dissertation explores the mushroom mania which reverberated through American society at the turn of the twentieth century, empowering Anglo-American women in new ways. America’s largely forgotten first mushroom fad illuminates gendered negotiations of foraging culture and public science. Beginning in the 1880s, a remarkable cohort of women helped turn mushrooms from shunned, mysterious organisms into wholesome delicacies for culinary and intellectual enrichment. Female enthusiasts fostered a vibrant mushroom culture and nationwide network of mycophiles. Culinary applications and poisoning fears legitimized women’s presence in scientific endeavors, positioning mycology as vital female knowledge for public safety …