14942 research outputs found
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The Measurement of Dreams
No full textThe Measurement of Dreams, a collection of original poetry, is an investigation into the parallels of the scientist’s and poet’s search for truth—and raises the question of what these searchings and findings mean when looked at separately and side by side. It also ponders the limitations of both processes and asks whether one can fully exist with the other.Master of Arts (MA)Englis
Functional Connectivity of the Supplementary Motor Area and the Caudate Nucleus in Prodromal Huntington’s Disease
No full textDenying the Hyphen: Issues of Identity Passing in Asian American Literature
No full textThis dissertation applies the concept of passing as narrated in African American literature to selected Asian American texts. The idea of passing in African American literature, perhaps best illustrated through Nella Larsen’s Passing, suggests a racial conversion experience through choice from one identity to another. In her introduction to Passing and the Fictions of Identity, titled “The Politics of Passing,” Elaine K. Ginsberg suggests racial passing as “[the] creation of a new ‘white’ identity” which indicates “a transgression not only of legal boundaries … but of cultural boundaries as well” (1; emphasis added). This idea of a newly formed identity that crosses over cultural boundaries in the African American experience is similar to that of the Asian American experience. In most Asian American immigrant literature, second generation characters process a similar kind of transformation between identities, yet not through racial factors, but rather through cultural means. Although recent scholarly studies on the intersection of Afro-Asian confluences have slowly started developing during the last two decades, there still exists a need for scholarship on the theme of identity formation—in terms of race, ethnicity, and culture—within these confluences. My dissertation will argue for an idea of cultural “passing” in Asian American literature. Through close readings of selected novels by Asian American authors of different ethnicities, including Lan Cao, John Okada, Maxine Hong Kingston, Gene Luen Yang, Gish Jen, and Eddie Huang, I will explore how several different modes of identity formation—folklore, family, language, religion, and food—shape the experience of an Asian American “passing.” The goal of this dissertation will be to answer one important question in order to better understand the forming of Asian American identity: what are the results of an Asian American “passing”?Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
The Role of Feedback in the Development of Decision Making under Risk
No full textPsychological research has revealed that subjective factors influence how people see risk. Most research on risk perception has been done with adults, but developmental research has shown that young children are considerably more risk-seeking than adults. It is unclear how our preferences for risk develop The goal of this dissertation was to consider how feedback influences children’s risky choices. Many psychologists believe risk perception is the result of a struggle between cognitive and affective processes, and both cognitive and affective processes rely on information about past experiences to guide future decisions. Research on children’s riskless decision making has suggested feedback may be important in children’s risky choice. Study 1 was designed to investigate the effect of outcome feedback and reward timing on children’s risky choice. I manipulated the timing of outcome feedback and reward following a simplified novel risky choice task. My results suggested that children who receive rewards immediately after making a decision tend to take fewer risks than those who receive rewards after a delay regardless of when outcome feedback is provided. Thus, children may use rewards to help track their performance. Study 2 was designed to investigate first whether encountering failure in a risk-taking task affects children’s responses in later trials, and second, how framing a gamble as a gain or loss influences children’s responses to feedback. Children appear to be responsive to feedback about repeated failure as well as framing effects, but only after gaining experience with the taskDoctor of Philosophy (PhD)Psycholog
Holes
No full textThis dissertation consists of a collection of sixty pages of poetry of various styles and forms, predominately in free verse. Subject matter includes family and relationships, especially between women of different generations; history, both personal/family and public; language; means of handling grief and death; travel and return; and sense of place/home. As a writer, I often find myself taking moments from my own life and transforming them into poems. All language fascinates me, especially words that are closely tied to the culture from which they emerge. Several poems in the collection rely on unusual, untranslatable, or forgotten words. These poems explore the relationships between place, history, culture, and language. All of these are intertwined, and it is often difficult to extract one element and study it discretely from the rest. Additionally, history, both collective and personal, often provides a stimulus for my poems and is useful in bridging the gap between personal memories and associations and those of the reading audience. I often approach the past through photographs, physical objects, or landscapes, or share stories of my own family’s history. Many of these poems are about questioning one’s own ancestry. I create myths about myself and others, often my own family and ancestors, building a story around a particular truth. In these poems, I rewrite my own history and experiences.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
A House in the Middle of the Road: Serbia's Otpor Movement and its Strategies of Nonviolent Resistance
No full textUsing Gene Sharp’s guidelines for nonviolent action and Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s four arenas of contestation (electoral, legislative, judiciary, and the media) that allow opposition forces to challenge, weaken, or defeat competitive authoritarian regimes, this study provides a functionalist analysis of Serbia’s Otpor movement. Serbia under Milošević was a particular type of hybrid regime called competitive authoritarianism, a regime where the rules of a fully democratically integrated government are violated so often and to such extent that competitive authoritarian incumbents fall short of the bare minimum standards of conventional democracy, bordering the line of authoritarian dictators. Combining Sharp, Levitsky, and Way’s functionalist perspective on social movements with those of sociologists Charles Tilly and Lesley Wood and Charles Stewart’s functional approach to the rhetoric of social movements, this study outlines Otpor’s strategies and analyzes them in hopes of outlining a blueprint for future social movements with similar political opportunities available.Master of Arts (MA)Communicatio
The Weight of Birds
No full textThe original poems in this collection, The Weight of Birds, ride the line between surrealist and straight narrative verse and examine archetypal familial relationships as well as trace the musings of a fictional character "Man" through a third person lens.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Englis
Digital image politics: The visual rhetoric of Anonymous
No full textThere is an ongoing struggle in the digital public sphere over the signification of “Anonymous.” Anonymous exists at the intersection of multiple discursive networks battling for control of the internet including governments, private corporations, non-governmental organizations, individual citizens and multi-lateral institutions. In this dissertation, I propose to document and analyze the battle for signification and re-signification of “Anonymous” between the American network state and hacktivist networks that deploy the moniker Anonymous.
Internally, I argue that Anonymous is a meme complex used by counterpublic networks of satire and/or dissent. Anonymous originated in a digital civic space: the image board 4chan. The tactics of Anonymous reflect the creative culture of 4chan. On 4chan, participants share, alter, create and exchange memes. Anonymous networks practice “image politics” and operate on a logic of mass inclusion that treats the cyberspace as a location of direct action as well as organization.
Externally, Anonymous highlights the contradictory nature of American responses to hacktivism. While there is universal rejection of Anonymous within the American network state, the State Department rhetorically supports hacktivism in places such as Egypt while the FBI, US Cyber Command, and NSA label domestic hacktivists as terrorists. The outcome of the rhetorical battle over Anonymous has implications for the future of free speech and protest in cyberspace. Domestic penalties for cyberactivists are severe, and the preservation of the rhetorical space for digital protest is under threat.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Communicatio
Slip/page
No full textSlip/page is a collection of poems focused on themes of motherhood, trauma, and grief. In some poems, formal constraint creates a container for the emotional messiness of grief. In others, formal chaos mimics the shattering experience trauma, especially the trauma of childbirth. My overarching concern in this manuscript is the slippery nature of human existence and relationships: the impossibility of holding what we love, and the inevitability of losing what we have and even who we are.M