Sociology Commons^™

Community Engagement Newsletter, February 2025, University Of Northern Iowa. Office Of Community Engagement.

Community Engagement Newsletter

Contents:

--- Engaged Department Institute
--- INSPIRE Conference
--- Community Engagement Celebration Day - Register Now
--- Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA)
--- McElroy Youth Leadership Funds
--- Veridian Community Engagement Fellowship
--- Sustainability Efforts at UNI
--- Certified Nonprofit Professional Credential

Front Matter

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

Christopher Dawson And The Challenges Of Interdisciplinary Studies, Joseph T. Stuart

Comparative Civilizations Review

The following interview was conducted by Ms. Bibi Pelic, the Director of Communications for the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. The recording is available on the ISCSC YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-hS2SdoZc

How Companies Heal And Maintain Health: A Unique Function Of Corporate Museums In Japan, Aki Kinjo

Comparative Civilizations Review

Capitalism is embedded in our civilization. Despite its faults, weaknesses, and sins, modern civilization cannot prosper without capitalism. Companies are the engine of capitalism. Yet, just like humans, companies make mistakes, sometimes gross. How do companies overcome unforgivable mistakes? This paper argues that corporate museums in Japan play an important role in helping companies heal from their sufferings, recover, and maintain organizational health.

I deploy a cultural approach to management, analyzing corporate museums as a platform for conveying explicit and hidden narratives. A cultural approach to Japanese management helps us understand why Japan has so many corporate museums, well …

How The State Replaces Civilization: The Japanese Exception, Robert Bedeski

Comparative Civilizations Review

By conceptualizing civilization and state as integrated systems consisting of interacting subsystems, their similarities and differences can be analyzed. The central hypothesis is that civilization consists of three material subsystems — economy, government, and knowledge — and one non-material subsystem, transcendence. When the transcendent subsystem is diminished or destroyed by decree or overwhelming rational and scientific evidence, the emergence of the state occurs as in the cases of the Mongol Empire, the Soviet Union, and communist China.

The apparent universality of this observation is countered by an examination of the Japanese civilization and state, where imperial transcendence dominated and reinforced …

The Rise Of China And The Concept Of Civilization: Constructing A Conceptual Apparatus For Cross-Civilizational Comparisons, Liah Greenfeld

Comparative Civilizations Review

The Rise of China and the Concept of Civilization: Constructing a Conceptual Apparatus for Cross-Civilizational Comparisons

The paper examines the deficiencies of the current understanding of “civilization” in the social science literature, among others exemplified by “civilizational analysis,” and proposes a new concept that adds to the conceptual apparatus of sociological theory — a new, fully independent of others, variant of the cultural process. This independence makes distinctions between civilizations as the root cause of socio-cultural diversity.

Combined with the idea of humanity as a culturally constituted reality sui generis, this concept allows the construction of the theoretical scaffolding …

Civilization, Civilizations, Civilizational State: Untangling Civilizational Discontents In International Relations Theory, Vlad Alalykin-Izvekov

Comparative Civilizations Review

Recently, a herd of terminological hybrids have trampled onto the field of International Relations Theory. These include civilizational state, civilization-state, state-civilization, civilizational nation-state, civilizational privilege, and geopolitical civilizational narrative. What do those notions tell us about global tendencies and trends today?

This paper explores the origin, evolution, and meaning of these terms; it also proposes solutions for problems of a nascent, multi-polar, and multi-civilizational world within the framework of an Integralistic Paradigm in IR Theory.

Books Of Interest Spring 2025, Stephen T. Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Books that may be of interest to scholars of the comparative study of civilizations and may add significantly to the body of scholarship in the civilizational field are highlighted in this new regular feature. These books are also available for book reviews in future editions of Comparative Civilizations Review. Any suggestions for books to be added to this list may be emailed to Book Review Editor Stephen T. Satkiewicz: [email protected].

The Germanic Legends Of The Gold Of The Rhine And Their Āryan Sources, Alexander Jacob

Comparative Civilizations Review

Medieval German legends regarding the gold of the Rhine have both a mythological source, as the gold of the Nibelung dwarf Andvari, and a historical Burgundian one, as a hoard possessed by the Burgundian princes. Here we point to more ancient sources of these legends, ones that are to be found in the cosmological myths and rituals of the Āryans.

Civilizational States And Nation States: A Few Preliminary Thoughts, Stephen Satkiewicz

Comparative Civilizations Review

Over the first two decades of the 21st century, the older certainties that shaped how we looked at the world have been shaken to their core. Most conceptions of how the world works were the byproduct of the postwar order that governed during the Cold War (1945-1991) and were expanded in the immediate post-Cold War era of the 1990s and early 2000s.

Does Treatment Setting In Ati Matter? An Examination Of Completion Rates And The Role Of Violent Charges Among Individuals With Co-Occurring Disorders, George J. Anderson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Despite the proliferation of alternatives to incarceration (ATI) for individuals with co-occurring disorders in recent decades, little is known about comparative styles of treatment used in this context. The following study uses data from a case management service in a large urban city (n=273) where several types of treatment are utilized in the ATI landscape. Specifically, this study compares ATI completion rates and time to completion or failure for several styles of treatment: clinic-based outpatient, residential, assertive community treatment (ACT) and personalized recovery-oriented services (PROS) programs. Results of a logistic regression indicate that individuals initially referred to residential treatment had …

Whose Innovation? Philanthropic And School-Based Visions Of High School In The Xq Super School Competition, Brett G. Murphy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The XQ Institute, funded by Laurene Powell Jobs’ Emerson Collective, launched a design competition in 2015 to find the most innovative high schools in the country. Their goal was to spark a movement that would revolutionize secondary school in the United States, a system they claimed was 100 years behind the times. Called the Super School Project, the winning ten teams each received $10 million. While XQ claims that the best ideas about high school reform come from communities and student voice, they also have funded selective ideas about “innovation,” including computer-based personalized learning. The organization’s efforts have grown in …

Quantified Lives: Data, Bias, And The Cost Of Categorization, Colin F. Geraghty

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project critically examines how statistical methods and data visualization have historically been used to categorize, rank, and control human populations. By exploring the works of key figures like Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, and R.A. Fisher, it traces the evolution of categorization frameworks from their eugenic roots to modern applications in artificial intelligence and global metrics like the World Happiness Report. Through interactive visualizations and historical analysis, the project invites users to question the legitimacy of these frameworks and reflect on their impact on society. At its core, this work emphasizes the need to move beyond rigid classification systems, challenging …

Constructing Women Who Do Not Reproduce In Global Neoliberalism: Critical Approach To The Abolition Of Legal Ban On Abortion And The Struggle In South Korea, Yumi Kwon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study historically examines the abolition of the legal ban on abortion and the struggle in South Korea, focusing on the construction of the status of “women who do not reproduce”, and accordingly aims to critically analyze how neoliberal reproductive crisis in South Korea has been reorganized into the new order through the constitutive role of the struggle.

The results of the analysis are as follows: First, by examining Fraser’s theory, I explain that when the “boundary” dividing the realms of production and reproduction is a place of contradiction and struggle, the phenomenon of women not reproducing is centrally located …

A Litany For Blessed Diversity, Emma De Ramón Acevedo, Marco Enríquez, Jordi Padilla-Delgado, Ammel Sharon

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

Ai As Your Ally: The Effects Of Ai-Assisted Venting On Negative Affect And Perceived Social Support, Meilan Hu, Xavier Cheng Wee Chua, Shu Fen Diong, K. T. A. Sandeeshwara Kasturiratna, Nadyanna M. Majeed, Andree Hartanto

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In recent years, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots have made significant strides in generating human-like conversations. With AI's expanding capabilities in mimicking human interactions, its affordability and accessibility underscore the potential of AI chatbots to facilitate negative emotional disclosure or venting. The study's primary objective is to highlight the potential benefits of AI-assisted venting by comparing its effectiveness to venting through a traditional journaling platform in reducing negative affect and increasing perceived social support. We conducted a pre-registered within-subject experiment involving 150 participants who completed both traditional venting and AI-assisted venting conditions with counterbalancing and a wash-out period of 1-week between …

Producer-Oriented And Consumer-Oriented Alternative Food Networks And Rural Revitalization In China: Distinct Trajectories And Variegated Impacts, Meiling Wu, Qian Forrest Zhang

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Alternative food networks (AFNs) have been increasingly perceived as an engine for rural revitalization, yet AFNs can differ in their founding motivations, operational methods, and organizational forms, which thus produce varying economic, social, and environmental outcomes. Despite this, the complexity of AFNs in the role of rural revitalization remains surprisingly under-researched. This study, drawing a distinction between producer-oriented and consumer-oriented AFNs in China, explores the dynamics of how producer-oriented and consumer-oriented AFNs are formed and give rise to distinct trajectories of rural revitalization. When AFNs prioritize producers' pursuit of alternatives to conventional agrifood systems over merely catering to urban consumers’ …

Improving The Measurement Of Gender In Surveys: Effects Of Categorical Versus Open-Ended Response Formats On Measurement And Data Quality Among College Students, Dana Garbarski, Jennifer Dykema, James A. Yonker, Rosie Eungyuhl Bae, Rachel A. Rosenfeld

Sociology: Faculty Publications and Other Works

While researchers have some recommendations for measuring gender identity in surveys based on research and other sources that are summarized in a series of working group and panel reports, we continue to refine our understanding and practices. Gender identity is usually measured in surveys using a categorical selection response format with a small number of response options (e.g., "female,""male,""nonbinary") and an open text response field to capture additional responses ("not listed, please tell us"). There is limited research guiding researchers on the use of other response formats. This study reports results from a between-subjects experiment embedded in a campus climate …

Response To A Political Critique And Personal Attack Against A United Nations Report That Presented New Evidence About Prostitution As A Cause And Consequence Of Violence Against Women And Girls, Reem Alsalem

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Elimination of Violence Against Women and Girls, Its Causes and Consequences, responses to the false and unfounded accusations and personal attacks on her Report on Prostitution and Violence Against Women presented before the 56^th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, 2024. I presented new evidence regarding the relationship between violence against women and girls and prostitution. Using human rights law, the Report described how prostitution is a system of abuse, exploitation, and violence against women and girls. The Report’s goal was to clarify concepts and terminology, …

Chatgpt Didn’T Write This: Evaluating The Impact Of Llms With A Case Study In Grading Cuny Language Immersion Program Student Essays, Benjamin Inbar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study evaluates the capabilities and limitations of large language models (LLMs), specifically OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, in grading essays from students in the City University of New York’s Language Immersion Program. The program serves English language learners with diverse linguistic and demographic backgrounds, offering intensive language instruction to prepare students for academic success in college. Using a dataset of 30 pre- and post-program essays scored by program instructors and ChatGPT-4o under three paradigms, this research explores the alignment between human and AI-generated scores across five rubric-based competency areas. Findings reveal that ChatGPT-4o aligns moderately with human grading, with the strongest agreement …

The Material Folklore Of Occult Zines, Jacqueline G. Coffey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone is a paper on and catalog of contemporary occult zines. Through the collecting, arranging, and analyzing of about one hundred zines, I stipulate that these zines draw from the rich and rebellious histories of both the occult and zines. With the dominating influence of multi-industry corporations on our lives, these often independently produced and handmade texts are evidence of the mystical and mysterious forces with which we still grapple. Not only do zines showcase the breadth of spiritual possibility, they can also be used to integrate new metaphysical awareness into mundane reality.

The catalog is also intended to …

Deuce Redemption: Grindhouse Cinema, Moral Panic, And Urban Renewal, Robert Brenner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

If you consult standard histories of the “redevelopment” of 42^nd Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenue, AKA “the Deuce,” you will read that it was filled with nothing but criminals and pornographers, that decent people avoided it at all costs, and the only way the block could be “saved” was by seizing it via eminent domain, evicting all the current tenants, and replacing them with Disney and its fellow entertainment corporations.

The purpose of this thesis is to offer a more nuanced alternative to these standard histories. I will argue that the Deuce was a lower-class, multiracial, queer entertainment …

Exploring Key Factors Influencing Depressive Symptoms Among Middle-Aged And Elderly Adult Population: A Machine Learning-Based Method, Ngoc Doan Thu Tran, Yi Zhen Tan, Sapphire Lin, Fang Zhao, Yee Sien Ng, Dong Ma, Jeonggil Ko, Rajesh Krishna Balan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Objective: This paper aims to investigate the key factors, including demographics, socioeconomics, physical wellbeing, lifestyle, daily activities and loneliness that can impact depressive symptoms in the middle-aged and elderly population using machine learning techniques. By identifying the most important predictors of depressive symptoms through the analysis, the findings can have important implications for early depression detection and intervention. Participants: For our cross-sectional study, we recruited a total of 976 volunteers, with a specific focus on individuals aged 50 and above. Each participant was requested to provide their demographic, socioeconomic information and undergo several physical health tests. Additionally, they were asked …

When College Is Not Working Out: Obstacles To Community College Completion, Elisabeth Lackner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My dissertation investigates what contributes to low community college completion rates, what college interventions may be working to support students, what are the experiences of the students, and how did the COVID-19 pandemic impact these dynamics. I am guided by the assumption that multi-dimensional inequalities including low level of social capital constitute a cumulative disadvantage for many students to be able to persist and to graduate. The dissertation includes quantitative and qualitative data types measuring inequalities outside and inside of college with two large student record data sets from one minority-serving open-access public community college and data from a student …

The Perspectives Of Play Advocates On Children’S Unstructured Play In Turkey, Bengi Sullu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Convention on the Rights of the Child has established children’s rights to non- discrimination, development, participation and the observance of their best interests. With this recognition, there has been a growing global interest in acknowledging play as a right. Yet unstructured play, in which children can choose when, where and how to play, with control over their play, has not received the same attention, support and investment as organized, structured play (UNCRC General Comment 17, 2013). The way adults perceive and support play shapes the play opportunities that are available to children (Bianquin, 2018; Göl-Güven, 2017). Additionally, institutions and …

A Meta-Analysis Of Intimate Partner Violence Treatment Programs: The Role Of Risk-Need-Responsivity In Treatment Effectiveness, Irina Fanarraga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nationally, it is estimated that over 17 million people experience victimization by an intimate partner every year. Additionally, individuals who perpetuate intimate partner violence (IPV) often have high rates of re-offending, potentially as high as 60%. IPV Treatment Programs (ITPs) are interventions designed to reduce recidivism among intimate partner violent individuals by changing their thinking and behaviors, ultimately leading to increased victim safety. Although there is significant evidence to suggest that correctional treatment programs can reduce re-offending, the literature on ITPs is less clear about their effectiveness in reducing recidivism among participants. Furthermore, while other correctional interventions have taken more …

Repositioning North Atlantic Treaty Organization (Nato): The New Security Dilemma On Trans–Atlantic Relations Amid Shifting Global Geopolitics, Daniel C. George, Indra Alverdian

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

The shifting global geopolitics have led to a new security dilemma in Europe, especially in trans–Atlantic relations. NATO as the vanguard of the trans–Atlantic defense pact is faced with transitional conditions of non-conventional threats that return to conventional threats. Due to the shift in the new global order, these threats require a repositioning for NATO to counter the new security dilemma amidst shifting global geopolitics. By referring to the three asserted pillars–the return of conventional warfare on the European continent; a more assertive Russia in the European continent under Vladimir Putin; and the geopolitical of China's rise impacted trans–-Atlantic …

The History And Manifestations Of The Metaverse In Contemporary Literature, Marlon Semuel Contantin Kansil, Wanting Sun

Journal of Strategic and Global Studies

The metaverse, an interactive and immersive virtual world, has emerged as a critical theme in contemporary literature, significantly impacting narratives and character development. This paper explores the history and literary manifestations of the metaverse, investigating its influence on identity, space, and social interactions. We find that the metaverse supports flexible and individualistic identities, reshaping how characters and readers understand themselves. The digital space of the metaverse provides a dynamic setting for moral and emotional conflicts, enriching the literary aesthetics of space. Furthermore, literature plays a crucial role in both shaping and reflecting the concept of the metaverse, employing symbolism and …

Backdoor To Scientific Racism: The Perpetuation Of Racial Bias In American Medical School, Jamarc Simon

Sociology Between the Gaps: Forgotten and Neglected Topics

No abstract provided.

Unrwa And Palestinian Refugee-Ness: Material Bureaucracy And Political Potential, Paul James

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the ways Palestine refugees and UNRWA engaged with the material objects of humanitarianism in the context of Palestinian displacement. In particular, the focus is on UNRWA’s basic ration program and the techniques of humanitarian governance illustrated by the use of ration cards that shaped and were shaped by the refugee population. The research asks how the ration card, as both a contested site of governmental rationality and object of political meaning-making, functioned as a technique for defining the Palestine refugee identity. To answer this question, the thesis draws on literature and conceptual work rooted in critiques of …