Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Earthbound In The Anthropocene: Spirituality, Collective Identity, And Participation In The Direct Action Climate Movement, David Alan Osborn

Dissertations and Theses

Climate change, as part of a broader ecological crisis, is becoming an ever more potent event structuring human societies and planetary ecosystems. As the climate crisis deepens, climate change is unsettling core human identities, as well as the ontologies that define and situate concepts of "human" and "nature." And as social movements act to challenge and mitigate the catastrophes arising in the Anthropocene era, the question of how to sustain participation is critical. This dissertation explores these dynamics through a study of spirituality, collective identity, participation, and ontology in a subset of the climate movement. The research questions were: (1a) …

The Lithium Economy: Bolivia's "New" Resource And Its Role In Revolutionary Politics, Zsofia J. Szoke

Anthropology ETDs

ABSTRACT

Through an ethnographic analysis of the lithium industry this dissertation recounts the complex way lithium industrialization has interacted with Bolivia’s democratic and cultural revolution, officially known as the proceso de cambio, and with localized social forms and structures, which the national-level revolution seeks to reconstitute. I will argue that it is important to examine the implications of lithium industrialization’s intersection with local experiences of revolutionary politics. The dissertation’s main contention is that the industrialization of lithium in Bolivia has been conceptualized as an insurgent tool of political change and social transformation by the Morales-Linera regime and as such it …

The Social Ontology Of Psychiatry: Psychiatric Diagnosis As An Ontogenetic, Interpellative Speech Act, Ashton Sorrels

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Psychiatry is the study, evaluation, and treatment of mental disorders – disorders that affect the behavior and cognition of individuals and which are associated with underlying dysfunctions in the brain and nervous system. Though psychiatry is a medical and scientific discipline, it also takes place within a social context that modifies its effects, particularly in its application of diagnostic categories to individuals. In this thesis, I argue that, because of this context, psychiatric diagnosis can be modeled as an ontogenetic, interpellative speech act. A speech act is an utterance or sign that constitutes an action through its performance, called an …

Validation And Perceptions Of An Advance Organizer On Main Elements Of Research: Philosophical Assumptions, Paradigms, And Praxis, Abdulrahman Alogaily

Dissertations - ALL

Novice researchers lack an understanding of philosophical assumptions, paradigms, and praxis (3Ps) and their relationships with each other in research. As a result, the lack of understanding and application of the 3Ps components by novice researchers undermines confidence in the rigor and trustworthiness of their research. This study focused on filling this gap by providing a learning tool (Advance Organizer – AO) that contributes to developing knowledge of 3Ps in novice researchers. To achieve this, a two phased study was conducted. The first phase used a Delphi technique to collect data of the design of the AO in three rounds …

Against Monetary Functionalism: A Social Ontology Of Money, James Payne

Honors Program Theses

This paper explores the concepts of individualism and holism in social ontology through an analysis of the ontology of money by integrating insights from the Critical Realist tradition as well as the distinction between metaphysical grounds and anchors. In doing so it examines alternative explanations of money's ontology like the paradigmatic approach of John Searle. The results of the inquiry are then connected in relation to the models of social explanation in mainstream economics.

Does The Scientist-Practitioner Gap Have Ontological Roots?, Eric Alexander Ghelfi

Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, the nature and extent of practitioners' dissatisfaction with the psychotherapy research literature will first be described. A case will be made that a deeper analysis needs to be conducted to fully understand this dissatisfaction. Next, this dissatisfaction will be framed in the context of a particular ontology that seems to have largely contributed to it. Most importantly, several features of this ontology will be described and connected to practitioners' dissatisfaction. Finally, an alternative framework for understanding practitioners' dissatisfaction will be tentatively proposed, and it will be suggested that this alternative could help researchers and practitioners understand their …

Staying With And Telling Different Stories: Toward A Theory Of Environmental Advocacy That Bridges The Scholarly And Political Selves, Michael Clay

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

As human agents, narratives allow us to make sense of the world. They weave together lived experiences into meaningful webs of understanding. One such web of understanding is the way we narratively make sense of our relationship with the environment in which we find ourselves. The aim of this project is take a closer look at how many current environmental narratives establish an understanding that places the human agent as superior to, and thus master of, the environment within that relationship. This project works to articulate different ways of changing those narratives so that the agency of non-human actants is …

Speaking Of Existence: A Previously Unmentioned Meta-Ontological Dispute Between Quinean Ontologists, Charles Norwood Thorne Perkins

Theses and Dissertations

In hopes of prompting a meta-ontological debate among eliminativist, Quinean ontologists, this paper shows that Trenton Merricks and Peter van Inwagen’s disagreement about the philosophy of language implies a meta-ontological disagreement. I first show that, according to van Inwagen’s philosophy of language, only artificial-language sentences assert positive existence propositions. I then use my analysis of van Inwagen’s philosophy of language to define the concept of apparent ontological commitment that he presents without a definition in his essay “Alston on ontological commitment.” I then present a previously unrecognized meta-ontological disagreement between Merricks and van Inwagen. I conclude with a discussion of …

The Queer Allure Of Digital Sociality, Benjamin Parrish Haber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the resonance between queer sociality and emergent forms of digital communication. Drawing from queer theory and LGBTQ social histories, this dissertation charts the convergence of digital social modulation with the polyvalence, promiscuity, and mutability of queer sociality. A close analysis of the infrastructure and design of Facebook, Snapchat, Grindr, and other queered social media platforms demonstrates how digital capitalism’s desire for lifelong compulsive engagement is in part facilitated by an appropriation of the ongoingness of queer sexuality and relationality. In highlighting the key role of temporality, aesthetic, and affect in regulating the creation and circulation of digital …

Enacting The Semantic Web: Ontological Orderings, Negotiated Standards, And Human-Machine Translations, Matthew Mccarthy

Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence (AI) that is based upon semantic search has become one of the dominant means for accessing information in recent years. This is particularly the case in mobile contexts, as search based AI are embedded in each of the major mobile operating systems. The implications are such that information is becoming less a matter of choosing between different sets of results, and more of a presentation of a single answer, limiting both the availability of, and exposure to, alternate sources of information. Thus, it is essential to understand how that information comes to be structured and how deterministic systems …

Breach: Understanding The Mandatory Reporting Of Title Ix Violations As Pedagogy And Performance, Jacob G. Abraham

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines how institutions generate, teach, and authorize normative performances through texts and/as pedagogical practices. Through an analysis of the University of South Florida’s mandatory reporting policy, training, and Title IX Incident Report Form, this project examines how institutions construct and privilege certain values, performances, and individuals as means of generating the legal compliance of the institution independent. These practices are valued independent of how such compliance enables and limits the relationship between students and teachers. I argue the University’s texts and pedagogical practices serve to substantiate, authorize, and perform the materialization of certain privileges and the normative standards …

Bodily Boundaries: Inflammatory Bowel Disease And Rhetorical Enactments Of Self, Molly Margaret Kessler

Theses and Dissertations

Chronic illnesses are seven of the 10 leading causes of death in the United States and the prevalence is rising. Of the many chronic illnesses, one group of diseases present particular concern and mystery—autoimmune diseases. These conditions manifest when a patient’s body attacks itself, causing a myriad of symptoms that often leave patients debilitated. Since 2013, I have been examining the contexts in which patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD)—one type of autoimmune disease—reconsider their bodily boundaries while managing new, challenging communication experiences. The results of this research are presented in my dissertation, Bodily Boundaries: Inflammatory Bowel Disease and Rhetorical …

(Re)Painting Self: Art Therapy And Ontological Security In Refugee Children, Domonique Jimerson

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

To be a refugee is to know loss intimately. The refugee experience can be characterized by the multidimensional loss the loss of loved ones, support networks, economic security, culture, safety, and home.^{1 2} The compounding of traumatic experience can have a profound effect on belief systems and identity. This paper will explore the relationship between trauma and ontological state in resettled refugee children. The philosophical concept of ontological security considers the ability create consistent expectations about the way the world operates to a stable mental state.³ The three states of ontology security and shock will be useful in …

Consensus In Anesthesia Handoff Reporting, Robin Lee Anselm

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Despite some improvement, no consensus exists to perfect quality in anesthesia handoff practice and policy. This quality improvement project was designed to assist a local anesthesia and perioperative workforce questioning the quality of its current handoff. Theories and models used to inform the project included the Inter-Professional Team Collaborative, Lewin's change theory, the continuous quality improvement theory, and the knowledge to action model. The communication assessment tool (CAT) functioned as a needs assessment yielding a gap in handoff practice of 25 participants. The CAT also served as the post project evaluation survey. The situation, background, assessment, and recommendation (SBAR) tool …

Automatically Detecting The Resonance Of Terrorist Movement Frames On The Web, Ugochukwu O. Etudo

Theses and Dissertations

The ever-increasing use of the internet by terrorist groups as a platform for the dissemination of radical, violent ideologies is well documented. The internet has, in this way, become a breeding ground for potential lone-wolf terrorists; that is, individuals who commit acts of terror inspired by the ideological rhetoric emitted by terrorist organizations. These individuals are characterized by their lack of formal affiliation with terror organizations, making them difficult to intercept with traditional intelligence techniques. The radicalization of individuals on the internet poses a considerable threat to law enforcement and national security officials. This new medium of radicalization, however, also …

A Black Art: Ontology, Data, And The Tower Of Babel Problem, Andrew J. Iliadis

Open Access Dissertations

Computational ontologies are a new type of emerging scientific media (Smith, 2016) that process large quantities of heterogeneous data about portions of reality. Applied computational ontologies are used for semantically integrating (Heiler, 1995; Pileggi & Fernandez-Llatas, 2012) divergent data to represent reality and in so doing applied computational ontologies alter conceptions of materiality and produce new realities based on levels of informational granularity and abstraction (Floridi, 2011), resulting in a new type of informational ontology (Iliadis, 2013) the critical analysis of which requires new methods and frameworks. Currently, there is a lack of literature addressing the theoretical, social, and critical …

A Semantically-Enabled Trust Model For Collaborative Environments, Joaquin Andres Reyna

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

The World Wide Web has revolutionized the way we find, exchange, reuse and integrate information at a rate inconceivable only a generation ago; but for all its perks it has one big weakness: trusting that the information retrieved is accurate. Web technologies and applications allows anyone to share information. This work aims to assist humans (and eventually autonomous agents) in the task of trusting Web resources, a very important step when reusing information found on the Web. In this research, we propose a new algorithm to tackle the challenge of assigning trust to Web resources. Our algorithm is inspired on …

Becoming Transdisciplinary: Exploring Process In A Research Initiative On Climate Change, Emil Tsao

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The subject of this case study is the Vermont Agricultural Resilience in a Changing Climate initiative, a transdisciplinary research team at UVM that has maintained success in meeting research and outreach objectives despite collaborating in a way that does not follow any particular ideal-type transdisciplinary process. In following recent science and technology (STS) studies' accounts of cross-disciplinary collaboration, the hypothesis pursued is that the transdisciplinary study of messy or "wicked" problems like climate change brings forth an array of responses from researchers whose disciplinary backgrounds already position them to pursue their research differently, particularly when they involve outside stakeholders in …

Using Ontology-Based Approaches To Representing Speech Transcripts For Automated Speech Scoring, Miao Chen

School of Information Studies - Dissertations

Text representation is a process of transforming text into some formats that computer systems can use for subsequent information-related tasks such as text classification. Representing text faces two main challenges: meaningfulness of representation and unknown terms. Research has shown evidence that these challenges can be resolved by using the rich semantics in ontologies. This study aims to address these challenges by using ontology-based representation and unknown term reasoning approaches in the context of content scoring of speech, which is a less explored area compared to some common ones such as categorizing text corpus (e.g. 20 newsgroups and Reuters).

From the …

Everything Is Flat: The Transcendence Of The One In Neoplatonic Ontology, Joshua Packwood

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation research addresses the relationship between the One and everything else in Neoplatonic metaphysics. Plato is vague in describing this distinction and thus much of late antiquity attempts to fill in the gaps, as it were. The potential difficulty, however, is that the hierarchy of existence in late antiquity is susceptible to being understood as postulating a being that is "beyond being." To avoid this difficulty, I propose an interpretation of Dionysius the Areopagite to show that being is, by definition, intelligible and thus finite and limited. Since the first principle is that which is infinite it therefore cannot …

The Psychological Turn To Relationality , Rusty R. Smith

Doctor of Psychology (PsyD)

No abstract provided.

The Good Life In Psychotherapy: Implicit And Influential, Emily Lonas Morris

Theses and Dissertations

The good life, or a flourishing life, is a vision of how people ought to best live their lives. Though this vision is vital to the conduct of psychotherapy, it is generally overlooked, and thus unexamined. The therapist's vision of the good life for the client guides his or her implicit and explicit interventions. Despite this, there is relatively little discussion about this vital topic, and relatively little training into the various approaches to the good life. In this thesis, I argue that this relative lack of examination and training is due to the lack of perceived options regarding conceptions …

The Dilemma Of Mixed Methods, Bradford J. Wiggins

Theses and Dissertations

The past three decades have seen a proliferation of research methods, both quantitative and qualitative, available to psychologists. Whereas some scholars have claimed that qualitative and quantitative methods are inherently opposed, recently many more researchers have argued in favor of "mixed methods" approaches. In this dissertation I begin with a review of the mixed methods literature regarding how to integrate qualitative and quantitative methodologies. Based on this review, I argue that current mixed methods approaches have fallen short of their goal of integrating qualitative and quantitative methodologies and I argue that this problem may be due to a problematic ontology. …

A Contour Tree Based Spatio-Temporal Data Model For Oceanographic Applications, Yuliang Chen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

To present the spatio/temporal data from oceanographic modeling in GIS has been a challenging task due to the highly dynamic characteristic and complex pattern of variables, in relation to time and space. This dissertation focuses the research on spatio-temporal GIS data model applied to oceanographic model data, especially to homogeneous iso-surface data. The available spatio-temporal data models are carefully reviewed and characteristics in spatial and temporal issues from oceanographic model data are discussed in detail. As an important tool for data modeling, ontology is introduced to categorize oceanographic model data and further set up fundamental software components in the new …

De-Mystifying The Magic: Meaningful Moments In Music Therapy When Working With Children That Have Severe Special Needs, Kayla C. Daly

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

The purpose of my study is to explore the “magic” that occurs in these music therapy sessions, and to discover what this word means for those who use it. For the purpose of this study we will define “magic” as having the occurrence of meaningful outcomes or moments in music therapy sessions. This study will attempt to reveal methods and techniques that are being used by music therapists to further facilitate the therapeutic process for children with severe special needs in their lives and everyday experiences. This study included naturalistic inquiry and phenomenological inquiry.

Ontology And Knowledge Base Of Brittle Deformation Microstructures For The San Andreas Fault Observatory At Depth (Safod) Core Samples, Cynthia Marie Broda

Geosciences Theses

The quest to answer fundamental questions and solve complex problems is a principal tenet of Earth science. The pursuit of scientific knowledge has generated profuse research, resulting in a plethora of information-rich resources. This phenomenon offers great potential for scientific discovery. However, a deficiency in information connectivity and processing standards has become evident. This deficiency has resulted in a demand for tools to facilitate and process this upsurge in information. This ontology project is an answer to the demand for information processing tools. The primary purpose of this domain-specific ontology and knowledge base is to organize, connect, and correlate research …

An Ontological Analysis Of Mainstream Addiction Theories: Exploring Relational Alternatives, Wiley Benjamin Hill Iii

Theses and Dissertations

Individuals and societies have long struggled to understand and confront, by constructive means, the nemesis of addiction. No other human ill has provoked more concern, accounted for more suffering, or elicited greater consequence than addiction in all its diverse forms. Although alcoholism and drug abuse symbolize the traditional essence of addiction; compulsive sexuality, pathological gambling, eating disorders, tobacco use, etc., are also believed to have addictive properties according to contemporary concepts. Numerous commendable theories and therapies have been offered down through history to explain and mediate addictions conceptually enigmatic and therapeutically resistant nature. As this paper will clarify, many of …

Measuring Marriage Or Measuring Individuals: An Ontological Analysis Of Marital Therapy Outcome Measures, Joseph Andrew Ostenson

Theses and Dissertations

Many scholars have noted the pervasiveness of individualism in American culture, particularly in the marriage culture. Unfortunately, assuming individualism in the marriage culture poses very specific threats to marriage as an institution. Some claim that these individualistic assumptions have also infiltrated the marital sciences, undermining the efforts of researchers who hope to defend marriage. This dissertation explores that claim by analyzing seven of the most popular marital outcome instruments used by marital researchers today for individualistic assumptions. Using a conceptual analysis called "contrasting relations," the meanings of both the content and the process of the instruments are laid out according …

The Neglect Of Divorce In Marital Research: An Ontological Analysis Of The Work Of John Gottman, Joseph Andrew Ostenson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores why the divorce rate has remained relatively stable over the past few decades, even in the face of rapidly growing social sciences – particularly the branch associated with the study and treatment of marriage – through an analysis of the work of John Gottman. This thesis chiefly claims that divorce is not addressed in marital research. It is argued, however, that far from being intentional on the part of researchers, the disregard for divorce in the marital research is actually due to underlying, unrecognized assumptions. Specifically, this thesis analyzes the most fundamental assumptions – the ontological assumptions …