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Memory Strategies Explain Racial Differences in List Recall Performance
No full textDepartment of [email protected]
To Decorate the Dungeon with Flowers
No full textTitled after a line from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, To Decorate the Dungeon with Flowers is a work of literary fiction that extends the Southern Gothic tradition into the COVID-19 context and remixes elements of mystery, crime drama, romance, the grotesque, regional fiction, and the feminine domestic. The novel takes as its model the specific features of the Southern Gothic as crystallized by Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner: the grotesque operating within the parameters of a specific region and time—Georgia from 2019-2020 against the broader American backdrop of #MeToo, BLM, and COVID-19. The novel traces the relationship between a sixty-five-year-old shut-in with a chronic illness and her caregiver during their confinement on a deteriorating peach orchard in rural Georgia on the eve of the pandemic.
After an alarming, violent incident with a student, narrator Miriam is fired from her job as a special education teacher, flees Atlanta and her public disgrace, and secures a position as the live-in personal health aide to Imogene, a shut-in with Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. Awaiting the severe legal ramifications to unfold, Miriam throws herself into her caretaker role as news of the deadly pandemic slowly penetrates their domestic life. Imogene, a digitally savvy expert in everything from cybersecurity to genetic genealogical research, enlists Miriam’s help in every esoteric project, including her most recent venture—a Citizen Detective web sleuthing group on the hunt to track down the reactivated “K-9 Strangler” serial killer. Desperate for any distraction from the demons of her recent and distant past, Miriam submerges herself in the bizarre world of Imogene’s life on the orchard. When Imogene’s estranged brother Ford, a New York restaurant owner and Miriam’s employer, discreetly tries to enlist Miriam’s influence to convince Imogene to sell the family estate, he makes Miriam a significant financial offer—one that would free her from her debt to her own stepbrother, Sam, who is paying her legal fees despite their long-term estrangement over a dark family trauma. Eager to escape her painful connection to Sam, Miriam must decide between dangerous choices and their consequences—loyalty and imprisonment; or betrayal and freedom.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
Abject Creatures
No full textThis is a collection of short stories and flash pieces written during my time at GSU called Abject Creatures. These stories explore strange worlds with exaggerated, genre-bending elements that pull from fabulism, surrealism, and horror. The worlds I have constructed on the page create states of abjection for the characters, who often already consider themselves societal outcasts. Many of the stories deal with violence against women and women seeking various forms of liberation in a patriarchal society, but I am also exploring the implications of late-stage capitalism and environmental destruction.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Englis
The Long Division (a novel)
No full textThe Long Division is a novel that applies some conventions and tropes of the noir fiction genre to tell a story from the points of view of five individuals whose fates are interconnected through the narrative. Jodie Larkin is an Atlanta housecleaner who, fed up with her thankless job, hits the road with stolen cash, desperate to reconnect with the son she gave up for adoption. That son is Calvin Nowak, a teenager eager to escape an adoptive family that he feels can never understand him. He and Jodie embark on a runaway quest to discover the source of his pain. Their journey will take them to small town New York, where Calvin’s biological father, Sam Hartwick, is secretly tracking the shooter in a double murder case that will test his reputation and his faith in redemption. That killer is Wynn Johnston, a college student gifted and tortured, who clings to his bright academic prospects while hunted by vengeful criminals, police, and his own demons. He strikes up a desperate relationship with Erika Hartwick, Sam Harwick’s legitimate daughter, just as Sam’s illegitimate son Calvin and one-time lover Jodie arrive in town and instigate a climactic confrontation between all the perspective characters.
The novel explores the value of family and how it can be tested by extreme circumstances, especially in paradoxical or ironic context where family is founded on, or broken apart by, characters flaws that threaten the stability of family itself. Likewise, it explores whether certain family relationships can or should be repaired, and the motives and morality of individuals when they support or subvert family dynamics.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Englis
The Development of Digital Human Rights in the European Union: How Key Interests Shape National and Regional Data Governance
No full textThe European Union has the most restrictive data protection policies among democracies today, having created a regime of digital human rights. Yet what contributed to the decision by EU policy-makers to place supranational constraints upon personal and cyber data use? At the national level, Member States’ preferences were influenced by three structural factors: domestic security threats, the growing digital economy, and the work of human rights advocates around data privacy. Law enforcement and security officials sought access to data for criminal prosecution and anti-terrorism purposes. Multinational firms asked for the freedom to transport data across borders, treating it as an economic commodity. Legal rights actors pressed for data privacy and protections. While none of these preferences have been mutually exclusive, EU policy convergence upon the digital human rights model is the result of pressure exerted by key states. Most particularly, epistemic experts and key political elites acted on behalf of the UK, Germany, and France to turn the EU Commission and the Council in the direction of their national preferences for data governance. However, whether the EU can successfully maintain digital human rights as it attempts to export these norms to the global community remains to be seen. What is framed as human rights protections for data continues to give considerable leverage to data brokers and law enforcement officials to use data as they wish.Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Political Scienc
Martine Means Well
No full textGirl meets boy. They fall in love. That is often the end of stories—but not Martine’s. Martine Guillory, a young woman in Louisiana, begins the first semester of her freshmen year in college hoping for love. Though she successfully pulls off a convoluted plan to date the boy of her dreams, her happily-ever-after is threatened by friendships falling apart, family drama, and her first year of college. As she tries to like PDA, she discovers that not all friendships need to be lifelong to be important. Despite years of secret-sharing, her best friends start to exclude her for a reason she can’t identify, and she begins to wonder if her own mother prefers her siblings over her. Set in a small town in an even smaller college, a young Black girl sets out to keep Prince Charming—and her sanity—in this rom-com meets social scream meets coming-of-age novel.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Englis
Network 'vs' Net-worth: Collaborative Network Structure and Performance on the Platform
No full textWith the rapid pace of technology innovation (e.g., smart devices, faster internet), collaborative content generation has become a widespread phenomenon observed in diverse settings (e.g., YouTube, Open-Source Projects, Wikipedia, and Scientific Journals). In an evolving collaborative environment, content creators also build social capital across different content distribution channels (CDCs), which facilitates access to available resources and opens pathways for various social learning processes. Due to engagement on multiple CDCs/platforms, user participation on one channel can also influence the performance on another channel (e.g., a content creator on YouTube can utilize his/her Facebook network for promoting new videos). Building on the literature in creativity and social capital/network theory, we examine the evolution of collaborative networks across different CDCs and their impact on the channel- and content-level performance outcomes. We use the AMA, a leading platform engaged with the scholarly content publication, for our study context and examine the evolution of collaborative network structure across all four disparate CDCs – JM, JMR, JIM, and JPPM. At the aggregate level, we share empirical evidence supporting an inverted U-shaped relationship between global elements of the collaborative network (connectedness and cohesiveness) and channel-level impact. Using the panel autoregressive (PVAR) modeling approach, we also examine the coevolution of various elements of a collaborative group’s social capital across multiple CDCs and their impact on content performance. Our findings highlight the differential impact of various elements of a collaborative group's social capital on content development and dissemination processes. Our results also show that elements of a collaborative group's social capital from different CDCs coevolve and can directly or indirectly impact the performance of the content published on the focal CDC. The channel- and content-level analysis findings also provide important insights to practitioners. Using our proposed framework, key stakeholders (e.g., content creators, channel operators) can take a holistic approach to understand the evolution of a collaborative network on a CDC and its impact on the channel- and content-level performance outcomes. Channel operators can understand the value of a content creator's social capital across different CDCs and better assess his/her potential for various engagement activities (e.g., seeding, production, promotion). Our findings also guide content creators in identifying the critical elements of a collaborative group’s social capital that can help in content adoption across different CDCs.Doctor of Philosophy in Business Administration (PhD)Marketin
The Yard's Edge: Poems
No full textThis manuscript is comprised of a selection of poems written during my time as a student in the creative writing MFA program at Georgia State University. These are lyric/narrative poems arranged loosely according to subject matter – family, spiritual yearning/mystery.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)Englis