Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

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 …

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 …

Hudson Yards: Hybrid Capital's New Home, Massimo D. Scoditti

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis focuses on the material and metaphysical aspects of the Hudson Yards, the largest private development in US History. With its roots in the administration of Michael Bloomberg, the site is representative of neoliberal ideology. It is also one in which cultural production is central. This is in terms of the rationalization and mythos of the building of the space itself and the dreamworlds created to obscure the mechanisms of extraction and accumulation that make such a complex possible. The Hudson Yards is particularly interesting because, as Cindi Katz might suggest, topography lines connect it to transnational capital. And …

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 …

Liquidity Commonality With Factor Models, Ernesto Garcia Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Market microstructure research has recently devoted attention to a phenomenon called commonality in liquidity. In this dissertation, I will analyze commonality in liquidity using a novel factor model approach and a generalized definition of commonality in liquidity. This analysis will show that commonality in liquidity is rarely a marketwide phenomenon and is mostly restricted to stocks with a large market capitalization. Additionally, commonality in liquidity is a very recent phenomenon whose appearance coincides with a rise in passive investing after the Dotcom Bubble burst and, more so, after the 2008 Financial Crisis. I will present evidence that suggests commonality in …

The Online Impossible Anagram Task: Development And Testing Of A Novel Online Cheating Paradigm, Emily Joseph

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

For the past fifteen years, the Russano et al. (2005) cheating paradigm has dominated research in the forensic psychological literature. While this paradigm successfully activates theoretical mechanisms for ethical decision-making, applying the methods for online data collection is cumbersome and retains a confound inherent in the design. Alternative cheating paradigms from both the psychology and economics literatures were evaluated for their suitability for an online cheating paradigm. The impossible anagram task was selected as most likely to elicit the same internal and external cost-benefit analyses online as the Russano et al. (2005) cheating paradigm does in-person: self-concept maintenance, ethical dissonance, …

Navigating Ocha: Lgbt Practitioners' Participation And Navigation Of Lucumí, Carlos M. Camacho

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation looks at the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Lucumí/Santería in New York City, with a focus on transgender people. This work uses qualitative interviews and ethnographic observations to look at how LGBT people navigate ritual space and people politics in Lucumí. As part of contemporary social shifts, many are seeking alternative spaces of spiritual practice and that includes LGBT people. LGBT people and trans people in particular are seeking Lucumi and being drawn in, this dissertation looks at some of these mechanisms. In addition, this dissertation looks at how home is created or …

The Effect Of Speaking Rate On Vowel Variability Based On The Uncontrolled Manifold Approach And Flow-Based Invertible Neural Network Modeling, Jaekoo Kang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant (“good”) and task-relevant (“bad”) parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token variability in articulation and acoustics can be decomposed into “good” and “bad” parts and how speaking rate changes the pattern of these two from the Haskins IEEE rate comparison database. Furthermore, it is examined whether the “good” part of variability, or flexibility, can be modeled directly from speech data using the flow-based invertible neural networks framework. The …

A Comparison Of Simulated Schizophrenia In Mental Health Experts And Genuine Schizophrenia In Psychiatric Patients, Amanda Rosinski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Malingering includes the intentional feigning of psychiatric symptoms combined with motivation for external gain (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Malingering is likely to occur in the justice system in both criminal and civil contexts, as there is increased opportunity for secondary gain in these settings. When individuals successfully malinger, it can be very costly for the United States. For example, if an individual successfully malingers, it can delay their criminal proceedings, allow them to inappropriately use resources associated with psychiatric or medical treatment, allow them to gain access to unneeded medications or financial assistance, or allow them to avoid work (Chafetz …

Telehealth Caregiver Training: Treating Food Selectivity Without Extinction, Christina M. Alaimo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Telehealth behavioral interventions are becoming increasingly necessary given limited accessibility for in-person services; while there is a growing evidence-base for these interventions, there are few applications for pediatric feeding disorders. Those studies that have evaluated telehealth feeding interventions have done so only after children received some form of in-person services. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a telehealth caregiver training package to teach caregivers to implement an alternative to escape extinction feeding intervention in their home to treat their child’s food selectivity. All three caregivers demonstrated high levels of correct performance following training and all children demonstrated increases …

Spectral Urbanism: Modern Ghost Cities, Rare Earths, And Political Time At The Limits Of Materialism, Linsey Ly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Contemporary urbanization in China is marked by speed, repetition, and similitude, key features of what I call spectral urbanism that also attends to the presence or absence, to recursivity and deferral. The mass development of empty, outmoded, and seemingly abandoned modern ghost cities in China’s borderlands come to be used as evidence of an interruption or lack in the veneer of Chinese modernity. The contours and quality of stalled development are measured, read in objects of the built environment that have yet to fulfill their anticipated function: vacant buildings, quiet roads that lead no one to empty parks, homes which …

Food-As-Medicine: An Everyday Strategy Of Health, Rachel Rebecca Bogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using food-as-medicine, a valuable strategy of health, as its focus, this dissertation examines why and how New Yorkers use food to negotiate their health. I argue that while using food medicinally is a common health practice, food-as-medicine operates unequally among different groups of New Yorkers. I attribute this inequity, in part, to how those in power, including public health experts, biomedical doctors, and the food industry, operationalize food-as-medicine as a health remedy and to a neoliberal, healthist context that ties people’s morally “correct” uses of food-as-medicine to their abilities to access “good” citizenship and optimal health.

I chose to write …

Three Essays On Exchange Rate Models And Their Applications, Azza A. Mansour

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1: This chapter attempts to identify the determinant of exchange rate pass-through into producer and destination prices using highly disaggregated firm-level data of importers and exporters of the Egyptian economy from 2009 to 2013. The main findings assert the hypothesis of complete exchange rate pass-through into destination prices at the lowest level of significance for the average exporting firm that is also importing. Furthermore, the firm with the highest import intensity has a lower percentage of pass-through into destination prices, indicating that the marginal cost channel plays a more significant role in determining the speed of the exchange rate …

Fitness Culture: Making New Persons In Quasi-Socialist Belarus, Emily J. Curtin

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines women’s fitness culture in Minsk, Belarus. While fitness is a global phenomenon, it has received very little attention within anthropology. I argue that this seemingly unpolitical subject plays an important role in shaping subjectivities and social relations in post-Soviet Belarus. Belarus, which is located on the fault line between Russia and the EU, has so far not transitioned to anything resembling either capitalism or democracy. While the possibility for political change has seemed nearly unimaginable under President Alexander Lukashenko’s long tenure, the recent penetration of global consumer culture—in particular, the proliferation of fitness clubs and a new …

Connect Or Protect: The Impact Of Ghosting On Potential Partner Perception And Pursuit, Maureen Coyle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As an increasing number of individuals seek meaningful connections in online dating, it is important to understand how online dating users’ perceptions and behaviors vary because of contact being terminated with them without warning (i.e., being ghosted) and their regulatory focus. Research on how being ghosted affects users’ expectations and pursuit of potential partners is limited, despite ghosting being a pervasive online dating experience. Also, the role of users’ motivational systems of goal pursuit, namely regulatory focus (promotion focus: motive to affiliate/connect with others, prevention focus: motive to avoid rejection/protect the self), on users’ expectations and pursuit of potential partners …

Motivation Of Networking Behavior: A Study Of Novel Interventions, Jeremy D. Rothstein

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Networking is a critical yet potentially underutilized career self-management strategy. The purpose of this dissertation was to explore the extent to which novel reading and writing exercises could foster networking motivation and network use. The first set, based on Social-Cognitive Career Theory (SCCT), was designed to increase participants’ confidence about their ability to engage in effective networking, and help them believe that networking is a valuable activity. The second set, based on Goal-Setting Theory (GST), was designed to help participants practice setting effective career development objectives and networking goals linked to those objectives. The Networking Information Control (NIC) condition was …

From Rulay To Rules: Perceptions Of Prison Life And Reforms In The Dominican Republic’S Traditional And New Prisons, Jennifer Peirce

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project explores the implementation of reforms to the prison system in the Dominican Republic, with an emphasis on how incarcerated people perceive their conditions and daily life in confinement. In 2003, the Dominican Republic established a New Prison Management Model, focused on international human rights standards and rehabilitation. This model now manages over half of the prison facilities and a third of the incarcerated population, while the previous, “traditional” model continues to operate in tandem. The “new” and reformed facilities (Centers for Correction and Rehabilitation) feature new buildings, programs, and correctional officer staff with multi-disciplinary training. In contrast, the …

Documenting The Undocumented: Experimenting Europe At The Biometric Migrant Archive, Romm Lewkowicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dissertation is a critical ethnography of the biometric governance of asylum seekers and illegal migrants in the European Union, an integral apparatus for the policing of border-free Europe. Interrogating the paradox of how ‘undocumented migrants’ have been—and are—the most documented subjects in Europe today, the research explores how this documentation assumes the form of biometric technology and its relation to the postwar eradication of Europe’s internal frontiers. At the center of these processes and my research object is Eurodac: a pan-European apparatus for the biometric documentation and regulation of Europe’s paperless migrants and asylum seekers. By attending to both …

Covid, Immigrant Nonprofits, And Online Services: A Case Study Of An Esol Program In Queens, Sabrina Lara

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The coronavirus pandemic has presented challenges to both the public and private spheres of life. For public facing staff in nonprofit organizations, there has been a need to adapt service delivery from in-person to online services. This transition has presented benefits and challenges for participants, especially immigrants who regularly depend on nonprofits for different service needs, as well as nonprofit staff. This case study examines the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Jacob A. Riis Neighborhood Settlement, an immigrant-serving nonprofit organization in Queens, New York, and it analyzes how they addressed the transition to fully online service delivery. This organization …

Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome And Promotion Of Maternal Caregiving: Missing Voices Of Mothers In Medication Assisted Treatment, Hedi Levine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In response to the increasing rates of opioid exposure among pregnant women and their infants, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) published “Clinical Guidance for Treating Pregnant Women with Opioid Use Disorder and Their Infants” (2018). The expert panel, which was assembled for this clinical guidance did not include women who were the focal subjects for the guidance. The current qualitative study contributed the missing voices of women in methadone-assisted treatment (MAT) who gave birth subsequent to the publication of the guidance.

The SAMHSA guidance was based upon a preponderance of evidence guiding recommended practices regarding rooming-in, …

The Influence Of Evidence-Based Sex Discrimination Policies On Women’S Perceptions Of Organizational Climate, Sexism, And Identity Safety, Maya A. Godbole

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sexism has proven to be a stubborn barrier to women’s participation and advancement in workplaces and academic institutions (Rosette, Akinola, & Ma, 2017). Importantly, sexism in organizational settings has endured despite the implementation of federal, state, and organizational policies that prohibit discriminatory behavior. One reason for this may be that because organizational policies are typically written for the purpose of complying to federal and state laws, they do little to foster psychological safety among employees and address the “chilly” organizational climates that enable sexism. To that end, the current research aimed to (a) develop novel, evidence-based sex discrimination policies and …

How Frustration Impacts The Relationship Between Potential For Child Physical Abuse Perpetration And Emotion Processing, Amanda L. Zwilling

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research conducted over the past 20 years has substantiated the serious, long-lasting impacts of child physical abuse (CPA) has on individuals, families, and society. Research has also suggested several appreciable risk factors for perpetration of CPA. Intergenerational transmission of abuse, described as the personal experience of abuse or neglect during childhood, is prominent in the literature as a predictor of subsequent perpetration of CPA. However, the majority of individuals who experience abuse in childhood do not subsequently engage in perpetration of child abuse as adults. As such, the literature has sought to investigate risk factors that mediate the relationship between …

Orban's Hungary: Lack Of Freedoms Becoming The Motivation For Hungarian Emigration, Fanni Sampson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the past 10 years Hungary has gone through some major systematic changes since the Orban administration took office. The implementations of the Orban government serve the benefits and power of his party and aim to limit the freedom of Hungarian citizens. Orban, throughout these changes, emphasizes the importance of preserving the Hungarian national identity, which he defines as far-right conservative christian values and takes control over everything that does not fit under this definition. This thesis argues that the Hungarian government is becoming increasingly dictatorial under the Orban administration which not only challenges the life of Hungarian citizens but …

Por Ellas: A Latina’S Autoethnography On Emotions, Achievement And Agentic Learning, Ivonne Barreras

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, students of Spanish-speaking descent classified as Hispanic, Latino, or Latinx attending public school districts continue to demonstrate alarmingly high academic underachievement and dropout rates. Standards-based learning environments and related assessments tend to marginalize people whose lived realities already make the prospect of achievement daunting. In other words, people living amid high-risk factors, including low educational and occupational aspirations, health, or family-related absenteeism, counterculture or early pregnancy, are often among those whose decision to drop out is most often influenced by social and academic experiences (Rumberger, 2011). Research on neuroplasticity and mindfulness explains the influence emotions have …

From An Art To A Science: Features And Methodology In Computational Authorship Identification, Jonathan I. Manczur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nearly thirty years ago, the United States Supreme Court revaluated the criteria for accepting forensic science and expert testimony, challenging Forensic Linguistics to assert itself as a reputable science. Much work has been produced in the interim to that end, but much still needs to be accomplished to satisfy the judicial standards. Computational linguistics has the potential to provide that necessary analytical framework. This paper’s intent is two-fold. First, there are two competing theories on the proper features necessary to identify an unknown author. Four features were drawn from the syntactic computational linguistics tradition and four from computational stylometry to …

Nuances In Bottom-Up Interpretations: Colombia's And Guatemala's Radically Different Approaches To Transitional Justice, Chelsea L. Carrick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Scholars have treated “bottom-up” transitional justice processes as a non-nuanced whole, situating grassroots actors in direct opposition to large-scale, or “top-down,” approaches to transitional justice. Such an analysis is limited because it fails to take into account complex contextual factors that contribute to the ways in which bottom-up mechanisms manifest. Colombia and Guatemala are two cases in which bottom-up actors have strived to influence the ways in which peace and justice were articulated by their respective governments; however, the methods and outcomes are strikingly different. In Guatemala, grassroots actors sought to achieve ethnic inclusion, neglecting class and land-based demands. Colombia’s …

Phonetic Contrast In New York Hasidic Yiddish Vowels: Language Contact, Variation, And Change, Chaya R. Nove

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the acoustic correlates of the length contrast in New York Hasidic Yiddish (HY) peripheral vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/, and compares them across four generations of native speakers for evidence of change over time. HY vowel tokens are also compared to English vowels produced by the New York-born speakers to investigate the influence of language contact on observed changes. Additionally, the degree to which individual speakers orient towards or away from the Hasidic community is quantified via an ethnographically informed survey to examine its correlation with /u/-fronting, a sound change that is widespread in the non-Hasidic English-speaking …

The Lopez Effect Remixed: The Significance Of Mattering Through A Hip-Hop Lens In Education And Beyond, Kashema Hutchinson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this dissertation is to examine the theoretical frameworks of mattering (Rosenberg & McCullough, 1981; Schlossberg, 1989; Love, 2018) in traditional and non-traditional spaces through a Hip-hop lens. When mattering is applied to marginalized groups, it centers them to a certain extent. In my dissertation, I examine how Dr. Nadia Lopez, the former principal of junior high school, Mott Hall Bridges Academy (MHBA), employed mattering in her holistic approach to education. Her dedication to her students, faculty and staff went viral on the popular blog Humans of New York in January 2015. Lopez’s commitment is to “open a …

The Influence Of Prosecutorial Overcharging On Defendant And Defense Attorney Plea Decision Making: Documenting And Debiasing The Anchoring Effect, Stephanie Aurora Cardenas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Strategic overcharging, a practice that some prosecutors readily employ to threaten defendants with excessively severe sentences, undermines the Sixth Amendment right to trial by coercing defendants to plead guilty rather than face penalties disproportionate to their alleged misconduct. Legal scholars and psychologists have long suggested that strategic overcharging may elicit powerful anchoring effects that bias defendants’, but not attorneys’ evaluations, of the plea offer. The current research sought to examine (a) the extent to which mock defendants and legal professionals were susceptible to the anchoring bias, (b) elucidate the mechanism underlying susceptibility to the anchoring effect in plea contexts, and …