Sociology Commons^™

Bridging Mind And Body In Sports: Performance, Psychology, And Buddhist Tradition, Gavin Jones

Denison Journal of Religion

No abstract provided.

All But The Death Penalty: Incomplete Protection For Civilian Internee Mothers, Minju Kwon

Political Science Faculty Articles and Research

How did unrecognised gender biases impact the codification of international humanitarian law (IHL)? While recent studies on IHL have highlighted historical lawmaking processes, little research has examined gender biases behind the codification of the “Protection of Women” in the Geneva Conventions and additional protocols. This study examines gender biases and state interests reflected in the codification process by focusing on Article 76§3 of the 1977 Protocol Additional I, which incompletely protects civilian women internees who are pregnant or have dependent children by prohibiting execution but leaving room for pronouncement of the death penalty. Referring to the theory of benevolent sexism, …

La Maquiladora De Sueños Is Where The “American Dream” Ends: The Socio-Cultural Impact Of Hai(T)Ijuanenses In The United States-México Borderlands, Pedro Aleman Perfecto

Master's Theses

Historically, Tijuana has been the destination for migrants who have been left out from the United States, Mexico, and the rest of the world. The city is at the epicenter of globalization where many transit, leave, and arrive. Sometimes considered a “third country” due to its binational and bicultural identity with its sister city, San Diego, California. The growing number of Haitian refugees that arrived in Tijuana in the mid 2010s to seek asylum in the United States overwhelmed the city’s infrastructure and left the Haitian community vulnerable, yet it created new opportunities and reshaped new identities in the region. …

Hidden Behind Happiness: Bhutan’S Global Image And Ethnic Exclusion, Deepesh Das Shrestha

Master's Theses

Bhutan has gained international recognition for its philosophy of Gross National Happiness (GNH), which promotes holistic development through principles of well-being, environmental sustainability, cultural preservation, and good governance. Yet this celebrated image conceals a darker history: the systematic expulsion of the Lhotsampa, the Nepali-speaking ethnic minority of southern Bhutan. This study critically explores the contradiction between Bhutan's international image as a model of happiness and the lived experiences of Lhotsampa refugees who were displaced during the early 1990s.

Using a qualitative phenomenological research design, the study draws upon in-depth semi-structured interviews with six resettled Bhutanese Lhotsampa refugees living in the …

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Numb., Anna Rapson

Masters Theses

Social media platforms, from their conception, posed a break in the lived experience of the average human being’s day to day routines. Although access to information has always been shaped by portals into other lived realities—through photojournalism, print legacy media, news broadcasts both on radio and television—social media has posited a novel phenomenological architecture where borders between embodied reality and perception of lived experience are simultaneously blurred and reinforced. This morphed duality of consciousness positions the body and mind in tension, deconstructing pre-social media conceptions of the ontology of lived experience. In a digital world shaped by limitless input by …

Domestic Travelers: Transparent Machines, Hollow Bodies, Hanyi Wang

Masters Theses

Digitization is not a modern invention. Derived from the concept of fingers, this mindset of packing information into quantifiable, interchangeable units sounds mechanical, yet eerily physical. Try to imagine: a ghostly hand with millions of fingers with the same length, likeness, and function. Under the worldview of Digital Narrative, we live in a digital simulation: everything is representable with quantifiable units, fluid across media. Yet under this spectacle of convenient abundance, something is missing. The Unknowables are replaced with arbitrary symbols, while the Uncategorizables are omitted. This is a framework that cannot accommodate human subtleties and complexities. One needs to …

Embodied Leadership And Conditional Legitimacy: Critically Conscious Male Leaders Navigating Systems Of Power, Luis A. Legaspi

Dissertations

Leadership is not a neutral concept; it is shaped by overlapping systems of power, including empire, whiteness, neoliberal capitalism, and cisheteropatriarchy. These interlocking systems influence how leadership is defined, recognized, and legitimized, often privileging particular identities and forms of authority. The persistent underrepresentation of people of color, women, and queer individuals in positions of leadership reflects how dominant conceptions of leadership remain closely aligned with historically entrenched structures of power.

This critical narrative inquiry study examines how men, who disproportionately occupy positions of social and institutional authority, make meaning of masculinity, power, and leadership within these systems. Drawing on relational …

Archives Of The Future, Ka Oskar Ly

Masters Theses

Archives Of The Future is a practice-based thesis that invokes the archive and the future as simultaneous.

This research insists on the recentering of HMong Indigeneity and its own rooted traditions of HMong Queerness and HMong Feminism as ancestral knowledge systems.

They are the medicine. To recover their cosmological capacity is to traverse centuries of systematic eradication by empires and patriarchy.

I treat artistic making, community encounter, memory, and materials as equally valid ways of knowing and as collaborators. Field research from 2020 to 2026 moves through kinship and artisan teachings. It spans Southeast Asia, France, the United States, and …

Material Costs, Karima Weinman

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how migration fatality and disappearance data can be reinterpreted through material craft to create a more reflective encounter with information. Working with the Missing Migrants Project's dataset, this project asks how design can communicate dimensions of human loss that conventional data visualization cannot reach.

The work situates contemporary border violence within a longer colonial history, arguing that the logics of surveillance and quantification that structured European imperial expansion persist in the databases that govern mobility in the Mediterranean today.

Terrazzo is a 15th-century Venetian flooring technique built from discarded fragments bound together into a unified surface. This …

Just Between Us (And Everyone We Tell...), Deborah Khodanovich

Masters Theses

Graphic designers are often obsessed with a broader public. The desire to be seen, to be heard, to have our work reach the broadest audience possible—these are goals deeply ingrained in our discipline. But why? Just Between Us (and everyone we tell…) challenges us to abandon this fixation, proposing instead that graphic design should concern itself with the private—the intimate, the local, the unseen.

This is where gossip comes in. Gossip is the language of the invisible, a form of sharing, and a means of knowledge-production and preservation that has historically been dismissed as frivolous, immoral, and—most egregious of all—associated …

Tuning The Neighborhood: Purifying People, Places, And Environments In Suburban Kolkata, Sourav Saha

Yale Journal of Music & Religion

In modern science, disciplines such as physics, mechanical and civil engineering, seismology, and acoustics have conceptualized vibration as a quantifiable mechanical phenomenon, measured through the metrics of frequency, amplitude, and resonance. In contrast, scholarship in anthropology, musicology, and sound studies has approached vibration as a socio-historical, cultural, and political phenomenon. This article examines how vibration (spandan) operates as a metaphysical, sensory, and ethico-affective force that mediates relations among people, places, and environments. Focusing on the practice of satsang adhibesan (devotional congregation), the article demonstrates how members of the Deoghar-Satsang community participate in sonic rituals of prayer, silent chanting, meditation, sacred …

The Autonomy Plan In Morocco: Legal Foundations, Political Dimensions And Prospects For Resolving The Sahara Conflict, Limam Boussif, Jalila Ait Soudane

Journal of Maya Heritage

Summary: The territorial conflict over the Sahara is one of the most enduring territorial disputes in international relations, involving issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and regional stability. In this context, Morocco’s 2007 Autonomy Plan is presented as a negotiated framework of self-government under Moroccan sovereignty.

This article analyzes the evolution and consolidation of the Autonomy Plan using a conceptual approach based on self-determination, territorial governance, and conflict resolution theories. It shows that the initiative has progressively evolved from a national proposal into an internationally recognized framework, particularly through growing diplomatic support and developments within the United Nations Security Council, including Resolution …

Les Grands Chantiers De La Transition Énergétique Au Maroc: Le Cas De Dakhla-Oued Eddahab Entre Réalisations, Facteurs De Réussite Et Perspectives, Limam Boussif, Jalila Ait Soudane

Journal of Maya Heritage

Résumé: Cet article examine la dynamique de la transition énergétique au Maroc à travers une analyse descriptive et analytique du cas de Dakhla-Oued Eddahab. Dans un contexte marqué par l’accélération des politiques de décarbonation à l’échelle mondiale, le Maroc s’impose comme un acteur stratégique en matière de développement des énergies renouvelables et de l’hydrogène vert. L’étude met en lumière les principaux chantiers structurants engagés dans la région de Dakhla, notamment le développement des énergies éolienne et solaire, les projets de production d’hydrogène vert, le dessalement de l’eau de mer, ainsi que la réalisation du port Dakhla Atlantique. L’analyse montre que …

Flowing Borders: U.S. Border Externalization In Latin America And The Los Angeles Declaration On Migration And Protection, Magdalena Olvera Hernandez

Master's Theses

In recent years, Latin America has emerged as a central transit region for extracontinental migrants originating from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East who seek to reach North America through alternative routes. This thesis examines the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, among other regional migration governance frameworks that have reshaped migratory flows, state responsibilities, and protection outcomes in the Western Hemisphere. Focusing on the Darién Gap as a strategic chokepoint, the study analyzes the effects of coordinated migration policies, border externalization, and differentiated state roles on extracontinental mobility.

Drawing on official migration statistics from Panama, the United States, …

Healthy Mother-Daughter Relationship Depictions In Television, Brooklyn Gallant

InnovateHER Meeting 2026

This was a qualitative thematic analysis of two television depictions of healthy relationship traits between mothers and daughters. These themes were presented to a focus group of teen girls, who discussed their relationships with their mothers and whether they found these shows to be realistic.

Governing Longevity: Biopolitics And Economic Restructuring In East Asian Aging Societies, Sherlyn She

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

How do rapidly aging societies govern longevity when demographic change threatens established welfare arrangements? This thesis examines aging governance in China, Japan, and South Korea to show how states simultaneously manage aging as a public-health problem and build it into an economic sector through what I term life capitalism.

Two interpretations of East Asian aging policy are widely circulated: that it is a peripheral case of Western neoliberalism, or a residue of Confucian familism. I reject both: the neoliberal reading captures marketization but misses the state as its active builder, since these states are expanding rather than retreating; the Confucian …

Strategic Silence: The Greek Left's Avoidance Of The 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe During The Refugee Crisis, 2015–2019, Harry Courts

College Honors Program

This thesis examines why the Greek political left, and specifically the SYRIZA government under Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras during the time period from 2015 to 2019, made near-absent reference to the 1922 Asia Minor Catastrophe when addressing the refugee crisis of those years. The Catastrophe, in which approximately 1.3 million Orthodox Greeks were displaced from Anatolia, is the foundational trauma of modern Greek nationhood and a living presence in Greek political culture. When hundreds of thousands of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees arrived on Greek shores from 2015, the historical parallel was widely noted. That SYRIZA rarely drew it requires …

Towards Critical Agency: A Case Study Of Japanese Peacebuilding And Development In The Bangsamoro, Hana Soma

Master in Public Policy Theses

Asking “In what ways have anthropological methods been part of Japan's peacebuilding and development interventions in the Bangsamoro?”, this research hopes to make a contribution to the study of anthropology and development and their practical application by exploring the possibilities of the role of an anthropological approach in making sense of modern-day development programs, particularly through the case study of Japan’s peacebuilding-through-development efforts in the Bangsamoro. After outlining the research question as well as the design and methodology used to answer it and an overview of the histories of dispossession and the Japanese relationship to Mindanao, the essay …

Inherited By “Merit”: What Caste Carries Across The Indian American Diaspora, Aarushi V. Jaiswal

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project traces the rhetorical formation termed “meritocratic nationalism,” a political vocabulary that makes national belonging conditional on moralized merit, converting structural advantage into the language of individual character. Meritocratic nationalism is traced across three political figures whose rhetoric represents successive moments in a single ideological trajectory. Reading Narendra Modi’s 2014 and 2018 Independence Day addresses and his 2014 Madison Square Garden speech to the Indian American diaspora as the formation’s originating texts, this project argues that Modi’s recurring moral tetrad of conduct, values, traditions, and ability translated the structurally concentrated advantages of India’s upper-caste professional class into a universalist …

Incorporating Principles And Wisdom From Hospital Chaplaincy And Pastoral Ministry To Create A Ministry Model To Address Social Isolation And Loneliness In Black Churches, Albert A. Kemp

Doctor of Ministry Projects and Theses

To address the growing and widespread epidemic of social isolation and loneliness, with special focus on Black churches, this dissertation developed a program with the following areas of application: 1) how healthcare trained chaplains can coordinate with churches to positively impact individuals identified as lonely and socially isolated with better social and physical health, 2) how principles of chaplaincy and pastoral care can mitigate and intervene competently when such people are identified, and 3) how the project’s model can be organized, taught, and incorporated into existing arenas of church ministry.

The purpose of the project was to create a ministry …

Latinos And Liberalism: An Evangelical Explanation For Us Latinos’ Record Support For Donald Trump In The 2024 Election, Charles Daniel Iii

Denison Journal of Religion

No abstract provided.

Reviving The Sacred: Reintegrating Traditional Tantric Philosophies Into Modern Yoga And Meditation Practices, Cameron J. Geary

Denison Journal of Religion

No abstract provided.

Sacralized Violence And The Feminized Body In The Book Of Revelation, Caroline Shane

Denison Journal of Religion

No abstract provided.

Gentleness, Meekness, And Propriety: John Chrysostom, Empire, And Women Patrons, Brodie Selmon

Denison Journal of Religion

No abstract provided.

Mahayana Buddhist Architecture And Sculpture In Central Vietnam: Harmony With Nature Through, Quyen Nguyen

Denison Journal of Religion

No abstract provided.

Notes From The Editors, Katie Corner, Julia Loeffler

Denison Journal of Religion

No abstract provided.

War Photography & The Limits Of Empathy, Andrea Shi

Student Theses and Dissertations

The proliferation of photography, particularly war and poverty photography, has had massive implications for the level of vividness with which Americans are able to picture suffering beyond their doors. The mass atrocities that have occurred since the advent of photography – that is to say, the last 200 years – are so relentlessly circulated that they feel, sometimes, as an inevitable byproduct of human nature. It’s not surprising, then, that a lot of media theory and analysis reduce the dilemma of atrocity photographs to a psychological level. Do they numb us, or do they incite empathy? Are they a call …