Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Racial Capitalism: The Political Economy Of American Punishment, Naomi Barbour

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

This research examines how the criminal justice industrial complex and existing political incentives have shaped American penology, ultimately contributing to the disenfranchisement and unequal representation of marginalized groups. It identifies a significant historical shift in U.S. penal philosophy, moving from rehabilitation to retribution, arguing that this shift coincided with the rise of economic interests in the criminal justice system, facilitating the emergence of the criminal justice industrial complex. The research further examines the effects of this changing environment, arguing that the growing influence of profit-driven entities, including private prison companies, has played a crucial role in radicalizing criminal justice policies, …

From Dictatorship To Sectarianism: Iraq's Domestic Politics And Minority Rights (1979-2023), Hiba Alkhuzaee

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

This study looks at how Iraq’s domestic politics have changed, moving from Saddam Hussein’s authoritarian rule to the post-2003 era that’s been heavily shaped by sectarian divisions. It focuses on how Shi’a communities were systematically oppressed under Saddam’s Sunni-led Ba’athist regime and then compares that to the frustrations many Sunnis have faced under the mostly Shi’a-led government that came after the U.S. invasion. By looking at government policies, shifts in society, and the current status of minority rights, I explore how sectarianism has shaped governance, complicated the Kurdish issue, and affected things like inter-sect marriages between Shi’a and Sunni Muslims. …

Classification Of Ghost Job Listings: A Two Step Bert Approach, Caleb Mathison

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

Ghost jobs are advertised positions where companies have no intent to hire which create significant frustration for job seekers. This study explores how to automatically detect these fake listings using public data. Analyzing 849 LinkedIn job postings, I developed a two-step detection method. First, I calculated a ghost job score based on warning signs like listing duration and vague descriptions. Second, I used a BERT neural network to analyze the text patterns. The results demonstrate that machine learning can identify deceptive hiring practices, offering a new way to measure labor market inefficiencies.

White Racial Identity, Climae Change, And Social Attitudes, Alyssa Engle

Senior Honors Theses and Projects

This study examined how symbolic racism, political conservativism, and White racial identity predicts attitudes toward climate change among White Americans. Prior research suggests that racial resentment vaticinates social and political judgments beyond explicitly racial domains, including environmental issues and policies which disproportionately harm Black and marginalized communities. Building on this prior research, the present study investigated whether racial identity dimensions predict climate change distress, and whether symbolic racism mediates associations between conservative political orientation and climate concern. Seventythree White undergraduate students completed measures of racial identity, symbolic racism, distrust in climate science, political conservatism, and climate distress. As predicted, a …

Application Of Physics-Informed Neural Networks On Crop Yield Prediction At Multiple Scales, Aditya P. Prabhu, Pratishtha Poudel, James V. Krogmeier

Discovery Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Internship

Accurately predicting crop yields is a critical challenge in sustainable agriculture, food security, and farm management. Traditional process-based models rely on agronomic domain knowledge, crop physiology and statistical approaches, while purely data-driven approaches leverage machine learning or deep learning models using meteorological and spatial data. Unfortunately, these black-box models(Data-drive approaches) often lack interpretability and fail to incorporate well-established physical principles. This project explores a hybrid approach by implementing Physics Informed Neural Networks, mainly, physics-based recurrent neural networks (PI-RNNs) for time-series yield prediction. PINNs allow for the integration of scientific knowledge directly into the model by embedding physical laws as constraints …

Quantifying Riverine Plastic Pollution Using Participatory Science And Trash Traps, Nancy Lauer, Madison Haley, Emily Sutton, Rob Clark, Hannah Woodburn, Emma Crider, Kaity D’Angelo, Cecilia Kammire, Brandon Jones, David Caldwell, Taylor Register, Emily Fritz, Samantha Krop, Riley Lewis, Lisa Rider, Edgar Miller, Stephanie Stephens, Louisa Pitney, Emma Kaufman, Emma Stewart, Jason A. Somarelli, Michelle B. Nowlin

Faculty Scholarship

Local governments and environmental nonprofits are increasingly using trash traps to intercept and remove escaped plastics and other litter from stormwater systems and surface waters. In this paper, we demonstrate the utility of these devices for collecting data that provide insights into riverine litter sources and solutions. Between 2021 and 2024, seven Waterkeeper organizations in North Carolina maintained 21 in‐stream trash traps in watersheds across the state and trained staff and volunteers to record the types and quantities of litter during cleanouts. Over this period, Waterkeeper organizations and their volunteers documented 150,750 pieces of litter captured by traps. Captured litter …

The International Risk Governance Council: Reflections On A 20-Year Experiment In Support Of Improved Risk Governance, M. Granger Morgan, Marie-Valentine Florin, Igor Linkov, Kenneth A. Oye, Arthur C. Petersen, Ortwin Renn, Jonathan B. Wiener, Lan Xue

Faculty Scholarship

The International Risk Governance Council (IRGC) was a nonprofit foundation, based first as an independent, freestanding Swiss foundation in Geneva from 2003 to 2012, and then affiliated with École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Lausanne from 2012 to 2023. IRGC's mission was to identify and improve the governance of emerging and systemic risks that have, or could have, impacts on human and environmental health, the economy and society, and overall sustainability. In this paper, we recount IRGC's history, describe its many reports, workshops, and conference activities (including tables referencing the many published products), and provide six brief case histories of …

Presidential Regulation, Timothy Meyer, Ganesh Sitaraman

Faculty Scholarship

This Article documents and analyzes the rise of a new mode of economic governance: presidential regulation. Today, the President regularly bypasses not only Congress but also the executive branch’s own administrative agencies and directly imposes sweeping new economic regulations. President Biden, for instance, created new regulatory regimes governing producers of artificial-intelligence technologies, companies that trade in or hold the personal information of U.S. citizens, and companies that can increase the production of energy-efficient equipment and technology. During his first term, President Trump regulated the kinds of technologies that U.S. telecommunications companies can buy and sell, placed restrictions on the electrical …

Essays On Innovation And Labor Market Benefits, Kyoungah Noh

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

The first chapter examines the impact of bank failures on team-based innovation, focusing on the persistence of inventor teams under credit supply constraints. Using U.S. patent and FDIC data from 2000 to 2012, this paper presents three main findings. First, bank failures significantly reduce both the number of team patents and the number of inventors with collaborators. Second, negative banking shocks decrease the likelihood that inventor teams remain together for projects in subsequent periods. However, team-specific factors, including geographic proximity, prior collaboration experience, and smaller team sizes, mitigate the adverse effects of bank failures and help preserve the stability of …

The Social Cost Of Plastic To The United States, Nancy Lauer, Tibor Vegh, Michelle Nowlin, John Virdin, Jason Somarelli

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

It’S Time To Stop Calling People "Stakeholders", Bethann Garramon Merkle, Evelyn Valdez-Ward, Priya Shukla, Skylar R. Bayer

Human–Wildlife Interactions

Although the term “stakeholder” has been widely used in science communication, recent expansion in the discourse around the negative connotations of the term necessitate that scientists and practitioners cease using the term. We discuss why this shift is necessary, how it affects our own praxis, and suggest resources for working through more respectful and just language. Looking to the science communication literature can help recalibrate terminology in positive ways.

Racial Disparities In Crime-Based Removal Proceedings, Emily Ryo, Ian Peacock, Weston Ley, Christopher Levesque

Faculty Scholarship

Whether and to what extent racial minorities experience harsher treatment or face worse outcomes in court are questions of fundamental importance for any justice system. Questions of racial inequality are especially salient in the context of removal proceedings that are triggered by immigrants’ criminal history. Many individuals in crime-based removal proceedings are immigrants of color who face a host of legal disadvantages that are tantamount to double penalties for the same crime for which they have already been punished through the criminal justice system. This Article offers, for the first time, systematic empirical analyses of crime-based removal proceedings decided between …

Political Turbulence And Aviation Safety: A Cross-National Analysis Of Political Stability's Effects On Aviation Accidents, Léa Faure, Lilliam Maria Cáceres Malachowski

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

To what extent does political stability affect aviation safety? This research aims to link domestic political conditions and public safety through the consideration of aviation accident frequency. Political instability can indeed have profound effects on reducing overall public safety in a variety of domains through its influence on public policies. Reduced regulations and governance efforts can appear in contentious contexts for less-prioritized fields. This could influence the reemergence of technical aviation risk factors like crew training and performance, maintenance issues, infrastructure problems, human errors, etc. This would highlight a correlation between such political instability and weaker aviation safety regulations, investments …

The Emotional Landscape Of Aviation Pilots: Analysis Of Online Professional Forums Using Natural Language Processing, Adrienne S. Renwick, Leo Gonzalez, Charles L. Silber, Alyson Mullen, Cass Dykeman, Adam Stewart, Jennifer C. Ross, James Geisler

Journal of Aviation/Aerospace Education & Research

This study investigated burnout related to emotions in three categories of pilots: commercial passenger, commercial cargo, and military. While pilot burnout has been previously studied, challenges in self-reporting limit understanding. This study extends previous research by analyzing pilots' anonymous online forum posts to gain insight into burnout-related emotions. Natural Language Processing was conducted with the RoBERTa-base-go_emotions model, which analyzed 1,130,530 online forum posts from commercial passengers, commercial cargo, and military pilots for 27 emotion categories and one absence of emotion category (i.e., neutral). An exploratory composite score reflecting burnout-related emotional expression omnibus burnout score was calculated using seven burnout-related emotions …

Charting A Path For Writing In Aviation: The Intersection Of Wac And Collegiate Flight Training, Kayla D. Taylor, Lindsey Ives

Graduate Student Works

Understanding how genre conventions shape written communication within collegiate flight programs is an emerging area of WAC research. Collegiate flight students, who will enter the aviation industry in a variety of roles, must be able to write in various genres, including incident and accident reports, in ways that allow a range of readers to partake in a proactive safety culture. This study explored how supplemental discipline-specific guidance affected the writing quality of incident report narratives composed by students at a flight school within an accredited university in the United States. Participants were either given no guidance, bullet-point guidelines, or examples …

Improving Concentration -- Three Techniques, Lauren Martins

A. Listening in Class and in Professional Settings

A one-page infographic based on the work of Clifford G. Schuette and others. The three techniques for improving concentration are especially important for classrooms and professional settings. These techniques are:

Be Here Now

The Spider

Worry Time

Good Arts, Good Mental Health®: The Effectiveness Of An Australian Health Promotion Media Campaign In Promoting Community Mental Wellbeing Via The Arts, Christina R. Davies, Melanie T. Pescud, Rhonda Clifford, Richard Mcgrath, Annie Thomson, Mia Jeffrey, Melissa Stoneham, Terri Pikora, Peter Wright, Sonya Girdler, Loretta Baldassar, Stephen Clift

Research outputs 2022 to 2026

Introduction: This study describes and evaluates Good Arts, Good Mental Health^® (GAGMH), a groundbreaking, population-level, arts-mental health promotion media campaign. The objectives of the campaign (Wave 1) were to increase brand awareness, comprehension, and agreement with the tagline Good Arts, Good Mental Health^® and empower the general population to form an intention to engage in the Arts for their mental wellbeing. Methods: The campaign ran from August to September 2024 (4 weeks), cost AUD$198,965 (23% creative and 77% media/advertising distribution), and targeted the Western Australian (WA) general population aged 18–65 years, all genders, in both metropolitan and regional …

Thinking Beyond Ourselves: Using Interdisciplinary Exploration And Speculative Scenarios To Understand The Human Experience, Shannon Kundey

Honors in Practice Online Archive

This essay presents an interdisciplinary seminar in honors that challenges students to move beyond the limitations of human experience and examine cognition and behavior across species, environments, and hypothetical extraterrestrial minds. A Choose Your Own Adventure structure encourages reflection on cognitive biases, thereby fostering a nuanced understanding of intelligence, perspective, and sociality. Author observes that students benefit from frameworks that disrupt human-centered biases and suggests that engaging students in speculative scenarios prompts confronting and questioning assumptions about intelligence, ethics, and social dynamics.

What’S Left Of The New Deal State?, Sandeep Singh Dhaliwal

Michigan Law Review Online

A vast body of scholarship situates itself in the New Deal era. Another extensive collection explores the history of criminal justice in the United States. To date, however, there has been little effort to bring these conversations together. New Deal Law and Order, written by legal historian Anthony Gregory, fills this conspicuous gap. Gregory remarkably narrates the New Deal era through the lens of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “war on crime” (p. 1), challenging how we think about both the New Deal’s legacy and the foundations of the modern security state.

Ai Literacy For All: A Universal Framework, Leo S. Lo

University Libraries & Learning Sciences Faculty and Staff Publications

Artificial intelligence has become a pervasive force shaping society, economy, and daily life. Despite widespread media coverage and business adoption, a significant gap persists between superficial awareness and meaningful understanding of AI's principles, ethical dimensions, and societal implications. This paper introduces AI Literacy for All: A Universal Framework, a comprehensive model designed to foster responsible engagement with AI across diverse populations.

The framework integrates five essential components—Technical Knowledge, Ethical Awareness, Critical Thinking, Practical Use, and Societal Impact—each structured into four progressive levels guiding learners from basic awareness to strategic insight. This design balances accessible technical understanding with ethical reasoning, critical …

Fostering A Culture Of Collaboration For Change:​ Tu Dublin’S Engaged Research Network ​, Catherine Bates, Mary Deasy, Ade Baruwa, Caroline Mcgowan, Catherine E. Gorman, Claire Mcdonnell, Fiona Prendergast, Lucía Morales, Sorcha Hyland

Research and Innovation - Other

Engagement drives a strong research culture, fostering collaboration, impact, and sustainability. It enables integration by connecting early-career and senior researchers; enhances research outcomes; and creates more opportunities for funding. This creates a more inclusive, diverse, and dynamic research ecosystem. Engaged research is co-created with stakeholders, e.g. communities, industries, and policymakers, to provide tangible outcomes and impact.

TU Dublin has established an Engaged Research Network (ERN) to enable knowledge co-creation. The aim is to build its capacity for Engaged Research, with a focus on the UN Sustainable Development Goals. It focuses on connecting and supporting staff and PhD students and developing …

Ce 622 Syllabus: Family Systems Counseling, Anquinetta V. Calhoun

Counselor Education Syllabi

This course introduces students to the theory, assessment techniques, and intervention strategies used in the practice of family systems counseling. The focus of the course will be on building a theoretical base for understanding and applying family systems counseling strategies and techniques. Didactic and experiential learning will provide students with the opportunity to apply and integrate knowledge and skills.

Ce 633 Syllabus: Ethical Practice And Social Change, Mitch Moore

Counselor Education Syllabi

This course introduces students to the legal, professional and ethical issues that affect the practice of counseling and psychotherapy and the methods and ethical basis for counselors to be agents of social change. Students will become familiar with law and ethical codes related to the counseling profession. A model for ethical decision-making will be presented. Also, students will be presented with models for social change in their function as leaders, change agents, collaborators, and risk takers. Providing outreach and advocacy services in the school and community settings, students will expand their role as counselors to include the social contexts of …

Is This Your Final Destination? Created Steppingstone Paths Differ Depending On Whether Paths Terminate Or Continue, Jeffrey B. Wagman, Will Ervin, Maisha Tahsin Orthy, Arghya Kashyap, Thomas A. Stoffregen

Faculty Publications – Psychology

In the ecological approach to perceiving and acting, affordances are emergent, higher-order relationships between animals and their environment. Accordingly, studies have shown that affordances are perceived ‘as such’ rather than as combinations of lower-order constituents of that affordance. We investigated whether affordances are created in the same way. Participants used circular rubber mats to create steppingstone paths from Mat A to Mat B (in the ‘Stop-at-B’ condition) and from Mat A to Mat B to Mat C (in the ‘Continue-to-C’ condition). We derived and analyzed sets of variables related to gap distance, path trajectory, and path variability. Consistent with our …

The Moderating Role Of Personality In The Relationship Between Cognitive Ability And Counterproductive Work Behaviors, Sarah Jacobsen

Theses and Dissertations

Counterproductive work behaviors (CWBs) are negative behaviors that detract from an organization’s goals and cause harm to the organization and to those involved. The current study investigated cognitive ability and personality as predictors of CWB and explored a moderating role of personality on the cognitive ability-CWB relationship. The results found no significant relationships for cognitive ability and personality with self-reported CWBs. Additionally, personality did not moderate the cognitive ability-CWB relationship. An exploratory analysis revealed significant relationships between personality and supervisor-rated CWBs, but no significant relationship for cognitive ability nor significant cognitive ability-personality interactions were found. The current study challenged previous …

The Choice Process Of A Higher Education: Latine College Women And The Effects Of Marianismo, Karina Trujillo

Theses and Dissertations

Latine women have significantly increased their enrollment in higher educational institutions throughout recent years. Castillo and colleagues (2010) developed the Marianismo Belief Scale centered around five pillars: “Family,” “Virtuous and Chaste,” “Subordinate to Others,” “Self-Silencing to Maintain Harmony,” and “Spiritual.” The purpose of this study is to (1) provide insight into how Latine women make the vital decision to attend college and (2) explore how marianismo may limit or act as a protective factor. This study interviewed 12 Latinx college women who shared their experiences on how the role of marianismo impacted their decision regarding their college choice process. Content …

Exploring The Relationship Between Athletic Identity And Academic Resiliency Through A Life Skills Transfer Lens., Lilla Kisvari

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to examine and explore the relationship between athletic identity and academic resiliency. This is an exploratory study with three research questions: 1) How do Athletic Identity and Academic Resilience correlate? 2) What are the latent classes that exist between Athletic Identity and Academic Resilience? 3) How do these latent classes differ in terms of their academic and athletic characteristics?

The study utilized secondary data which were collected in 2020 and included a total of 489 participants. The participants completed the Athletic Identity Measurement Scale (AIMS) and the Academic Resiliency Scale (ARS-30). Findings revealed that …

A 14-Year Content Analysis Of School-Family Partnership Publications In Counseling: Trends, Gaps, And Future Directions, Yi-Wen Su, Dan Li

Counselor Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

This content analysis examined 55 articles on school-family-community partnerships published in counseling journals between 2010 and 2024, identifying trends in publication type, methodology, and population focus. Most articles (54.54%) were conceptual, with Professional School Counseling leading in publication volume. Limited empirical research and a lack of focus on diverse populations were noted, with only 18.18% addressing racial minorities (primarily Latino and African American) and 5.45% focusing on rural communities. Four primary strategies for strengthening partnerships emerged: Inclusivity, Leadership and Empowerment, Equity-Focused, and Consistent Communication—each aligning with the school counselor’s roles in fostering collaborative, equitable partnerships. Recommendations emphasize a need for …

Gatekeeping As An Online Adjunct Clinical Instructor In Counselor Education, Bernadet Dejonge, Deborah J. Rubel, Yun Shi

Counselor Education Faculty Publications and Presentations

This interpretative phenomenological analysis study examined how adjunct instructors teaching online clinical counseling courses experienced gatekeeping in the context of the university system. The research question was: How do online, adjunct instructors teaching master’s level clinical counseling courses experience their university interactions as a part of gatekeeping? The participants described five experiential themes. These were: a) Balancing marginalization in the system with advocacy for the profession; b) Maneuvering through dependency on the system in gatekeeping; c) Finding consultation while navigating gatekeeping interactions; d) Managing the intensity of clinical courses; and e) Navigating the steep learning curve of learning how to …

Engaging The Community, Providing Hopes, Mackenzie Peeke, Margaret West, Alyssa Wilkinson, Matthew Serrata, Michael Baroody, Conner Tembe, Chrisney Yerena

HOPES Free Clinic Publications

Founded in the 1970s as a grassroots effort to provide care to the underserved population of Hampton Roads, Eastern Virginia Medical School (EVMS) has long been committed to community-centered care. The HOPES Free Clinic is a manifestation of that mission. Launched in 2011 as a student-run phone triage service, the Health Outreach Partnership of EVMS Students (HOPES) later transitioned to provide direct clinical services—becoming the first student-run free clinic in the Commonwealth of Virginia. In 2014, HOPES integrated into Community Engaged Learning to enhance and solidify its efforts. Since its inception, medical and health professions students have partnered with volunteer …