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From Culture to Commodity: The History of the Indie Rock Genre
No full textThesis (B.A. in Art History)--John Cabot University, Spring 2025.Over the several decades, the music genre of indie rock has transformed from its scene-based subcultural roots into a genre that uses aesthetics and fluidity with other genres in the digital age. This thesis looks at the evolution of indie rock, where we look at the history and influence of both punk and grunge—two important subcultures whose D.I.Y. ethics and alternative mindsets helped define the early indie rock identity. By using subcultural theory, particularly through the work of Dick Hebdige and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, this thesis examines how early indie rock thrived due to the reliance of alternative music subcultures and their resistance through music, style, and community. However, as indie rock moved into the 2000s and today, these subcultural qualities would fade due to the genre’s reliance on forward experimentation, focus on aesthetics, the creation of the internet and streaming services, and a new emphasis on individuality. This would lead to understanding post-subcultural theory, where this thesis explores how indie rock evolved from a set genre into a more vague and aestheticized mood—defined as much by social, fashion choices, playlist culture, and an emotional resonance. Throughout the genre’s history, indie rock blooms out of its subcultural roots while managing to have its rebellious and alternative soul
Armed Peace: Civilian Firearms, Gender-Responsive Governance, and the Severity of Intimate Partner Violence in Peacetime Societies
No full textMaster of Arts in International Affairs -- John Cabot University, Fall 2025.This study investigates how civilian firearm prevalence and GRL jointly influence the severity of IPV across countries. Using cross-national quantitative analysis alongside qualitative case studies of New Zealand, Finland, and France, it assesses whether firearm availability increases IPV lethality and whether strong GRL reduces this risk. Quantitative results show that the positive association between firearms and IPV severity is not statistically significant once GRL and socioeconomic factors are introduced, underscoring the importance of structural and institutional contexts. The case studies reveal that institutional capacity, enforcement, and social norms fundamentally shape how firearms translate into severe IPV. In contrast to New Zealand and France, where enforcement gaps and unregistered firearms are common, Finland mitigates severity through strong institutions, welfare, and civic norms. These findings suggest that rather than being deterministic drivers, firearms are conditional risk amplifiers. This study also emphasizes the limitations of global data, as underreporting of IPV and incomplete information on illicit firearms impede understanding, reinforcing the need for improved international and tailored reporting systems to better understand the dimensions of harm facing women. Policy Recommendations: 1. Promote risk-based firearm restrictions tied to violent histories and protection orders. 2. Strengthen coordination among law enforcement, judicial systems, and social services to ensure timely, survivor-centered interventions. 3. Support survivor-centered infrastructure, including shelters, trauma-informed services, and culturally responsive outreach. 4. Improve international reporting transparency and data standardization of IPV and both legal and illicit civilian firearm holdings in order to enable evidence-based policy and cross-national learning
The Domestication of Marian Iconography: Psychoanalytic and Aesthetic Subversion in Max Ernst’s The Virgin Spanking the Christ Child Before Three Witnesses
No full textThesis (B.A. in Art History, Minor in Philosophy)--John Cabot University, Fall 2025.This thesis examines Max Ernst’s La Vierge corrigeant l’Enfant Jésus devant trois témoins (1926) as a visual structure in which authority, repression, visibility, and sacred form are reconfigured under the conditions of modernity. Rather than approaching the painting as an isolated act of anti-clerical provocation, the study situates it at the intersection of Surrealist theory, interwar cultural trauma, and the persistence of religious power after the collapse of metaphysical belief. The Virgin’s authority, the Child’s exposure, and the presence of the witnesses are treated not as symbolic inversions alone, but as a system in which discipline, spectatorship, and psychic inscription converge. The analysis unfolds through a layered methodological framework drawing on Freud’s theories of repression, taboo, and the uncanny; Lacan’s concept of the gaze; Foucault’s model of surveillance and docile bodies; Bataille’s economy of transgression and continuity; Artaud’s conception of metaphysical theatre; and Nietzsche’s critique of moral value and asceticism. These perspectives do not function as external interpretations imposed upon the image, but as diagnostic tools through which the painting’s internal logic of power, visibility, and affect becomes legible. Scholarship has largely framed the work through iconographic inversion; this thesis argues that the painting operates as a site where the sacred is neither destroyed nor preserved, but structurally displaced. Sanctity is reorganized through bodily vulnerability, authority through maternal discipline, and belief through the optics of exposure rather than transcendence. The three witnesses establish a regime of looking that implicates the viewer within the scene’s economy of control, transforming spectatorship into participation. By reading the painting simultaneously as historical artifact, psychic construction, and philosophical problem, this study proposes that Ernst’s work does not 2 merely negate religious form but reveals the modern mechanisms through which power continues to operate after theology has lost its ground
Crafting and Maintaining Socio-Ecological Commons: Notes from a City of Ruins
No full textOnce dismissed as a model of resource management that is doomed to fail, over the last three decades the commons have been taken up in academic research and social practices as a form of self-governance providing paths away from profit-oriented development in urban and rural settings. This article draws on research on a situated commoning project in a post-industrial area in Rome, Italy, to explore how contemporary activist practices complicate prevalent definitions of the commons based on the bifurcation between active human collectives and passive resources. It begins by briefly outlining influential perspectives on the commons, including Anna Tsing’s anthropological work on ‘latent commons’. Then, it problematizes and extends these debates through the analysis of the Italian case. Drawing on feminist perspectives on more-than-human interdependences, as well as Marxist insights on contentious commoning, it brings to the fore relations of care and repair that strive to create enduring paths of urban decommodification, as well as forms of collective flourishing in contexts of uneven social and ecological precarity
Women’s Leadership in the Healthcare Landscape. Original Evidence from an Innovative Narrative Review of the Literature: The Female-Led Study
No full textThe “great man” theory inherently excludes women as it traditionally focuses on leadership features associated with men. In recent years, the healthcare sector has experienced a growing presence of women in leadership roles; however, although female health workers significantly outnumber men, the number of women leaders remains lower than that of men.
This article seeks to investigate potential differences between male and female leadership, identify the winning characteristics of female leadership, and examine the barriers and obstacles that may preclude women’s access to leadership positions. A review of existing reviews available on PubMed was conducted using specific search queries. The authors analyzed the selected articles according to specific inclusion and exclusion criteria, using the PICO methodology. Out of 967 articles, 18 met the inclusion criteria.
The most frequently identified characteristics of female leadership included a democratic and non-individualistic style, strong communication skills, and empathy. The most common obstacles to the advancement of female leadership included lower compensation, persistent stereotypes and prejudices, and insufficient support from institutions in addressing the gender gap. Academic studies confirm that women tend to adopt a transformational leadership style, in contrast to the more autocratic and assertive male leadership. Further research on female leadership is essential for monitoring progress and fostering actions that allow women to thrive in top leadership positions
Knights
No full textThe medieval knight in his Victorian reincarnation, crystallised by Thomas Carlyle, provides a national and autochthonous model to counter the alienation produced by industrialisation and political unrest, and is a model which easily morphed into that equally protean entity that is the English gentleman. The Victorian gentleman is defined by Englishness and the common sense that is his birth-right, while Victorian women are increasingly excluded from this ancestry and from social activity. Arthur Donnithorne, Stephen Guest, Sir James Chettam and Heinleigh Grandcourt embody different versions of a common sense gentleman, and their behaviour is perfectly in line with what the world expects of them. Exploding the myth of the Victorian gentleman as knight, Evans shows their destructive, violent, predatory, and self-serving practices proving that the new myth of Victorian manliness adopts and perpetuates the same attitude towards women of the older narratives
Felice Casorati’s L’idiota: Subverting Eugenic Ideals in Fascist Italy
No full textMaster of Arts in Art History -- John Cabot University, Fall 2025.Felice Casorati’s L’idiota (1932) offers a visual subversion of Fascist biopolitics, gender ideology, and eugenic discourse in the ventennio. Situating Casorati within the intellectual milieu of 1920s Turin reveals his anti-fascism that is conveyed in the work in question. Through visual analysis, archival research and contextual study of Fascist cultural policy, Casorati’s monumental nude is presented as an image of both idealised fertility and pathological exclusion. By aligning the iconography of L’idiota with early twentieth century eugenic rhetoric and pro-natalist propaganda, the work critiques the contradictions within Mussolini’s regenerative project, which sought both quantitative and qualitative improvement of the Italian race. Engagement with the literary influence of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot (1869) provides a moral framework for Casorati, in which the subversive potential of innocence is utilised in challenge to the Fascist regime’s eugenic programme
Exploring the influence of age, gender, stigma, and years living with HIV on mental health outcomes.
No full textBackground
People living with HIV/AIDS face a myriad of discrimination and social stigma experiences. As a result of progress observed throughout the HIV epidemic, an ageing population of people living with HIV/AIDS exists, potentially facing greater mental health challenges from combined chronic conditions and stigma. Hence, this research aims to determine the additional value of age, years living with HIV, and gender, in conjunction with overall and internalized stigma in predicting clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety.
Methods
The sample consists of 1666 people living with HIV PLHA, aged between 18 and 76 years who participated in a community-based study across Brazil. Participants provided responses on HIV-related stigma, Internalized AIDS-Related Stigma, and to the Patient Health Questionnaire, which demonstrated excellent psychometric proprieties.
Results
Gender and stigma increased the likelihood of significant symptoms of anxiety, accounting for the influence of age and years of living with HIV. Odds were higher among those who reported transgender identity (ORa = 2.05; 95% CI: 1.13, 3.70). Also, women reported significantly higher chances for anxiety (ORa = 1.36; 95% CI: 1.05, 1.76). Both HIV-related (ORa = 1.05; 95% CI: 1.01, 1.08) and internalized stigma (ORa = 1.30; 95% CI: 1.21, 1.40) were associated with anxiety. General and internalized stigma were the unique predictors for depression, with adjusted OR ranging from 1.07 (95% CI: 1.03, 1.10) to 1.41 (95% CI: 1.31, 1.53), respectively.
Conclusions
Stigma constitutes a significant obstacle for initiatives aimed at HIV prevention and therapeutic programmes, and the main findings of this study revealed that factors associated with clinically significant symptoms of depression and anxiety were predominantly allied with psychosocial stressors and gender identity indicators. Limitations, implications for practice and policy are addressed
Shades of feminism in Iran: Islamic feminism between secularization theory and neoimperialism of the West
No full textMaster of Arts in International Affairs -- John Cabot University, Fall 2025.This thesis lies at the intersection of the development of the scholarly discipline of Islamic feminism with the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, and the establishment of the Islamic Republic. Founded primarily by its Iranian proponents, Islamic feminism has sparked profound debates within its field since its inception. By tracing the development of the Iranian women’s movement through an Islamic feminist lens, I argue that the Iranian case challenges the classical secularization thesis (Dixon, 2008), which holds that modernization inevitably causes the decline of religion in the social and political sphere. The women’s movement in Iran has largely been molded by the relationship between religion and the state. Using a desk research case-study approach, this study traces the evolution of the Iranian women’s movement from the time of reforms under Pahlavi (1925-1979)—including the unveiling policies of Reza Shah (1936) and the White Revolution (1963) under Mohammad Reza Shah—to contemporary mobilization movements, especially the Woman, Life, Freedom movement (2022-present). Furthermore, this thesis challenges Western academia which considers the condition of women in Iran as determined by the oppressive theocratic state. Taken in isolation, this is a reductionist top-down conclusion. In contrast, this paper takes a bottom-up approach, highlighting the agency o f Iranian women in their internal struggle through a critical analysis of the modus operandi of the Iranian women’s movement. The scholarship is studied to develop an understanding of the process of negotiation between the women’s movement and the state, which allowed women to gain agency from within, against the gender segregation regime imposed by the Islamic Republic. Considering the influence of global secular feminist vocabularies on Iranian women’s activist movements, it can be deduced that most global feminist discourse is embedded in Western assumptions, with the exception of approaches such as critical 2 feminist theory and intersectional feminist theory. Thus, they are largely inapplicable in non-Western contexts. Instead, I argue that what had become global feminism must be exposed as a rather limited secular feminist framework, built on the principles of liberalism. In order to be universal, global feminist movements need to include shades of feminism which are applicable to non-Western, and non-secular contexts. reframed and adapted to the local context in order to be effective. The development of Islamic feminism as a field of study highlights this need, working within religion to propose reinterpretations of sacred religious texts through a feminist lens which then offer theoretical support of gender equality. Like global feminist movements, this framework challenges the institutionalized patriarchy, but does so without opposing religion. The paper suggests that adopting these instruments would allow the Iranian women’s movement to better respond to the ongoing state repression
Managing Social and Environmental Disclosure Under Pressure: Distortions and Legitimacy Risks
No full textSustainability disclosure has become a central component of corporate governance, yet it remains an area marked by ambiguity, uneven standards and growing institutional pressure. Firms are increasingly required to provide information that is complete, credible and defensible, but internal capabilities often lag behind expanding regulatory and stakeholder expectations. This misalignment creates a structural tension in which sustainability disclosure becomes a strategic act shaped by uncertainty, managerial interpretation and institutional dynamics. Drawing on institutional theory, legitimacy theory and research on corporate transparency, this article develops a conceptual framework to explain why and when organizations distort sustainability disclosure through overstatement or understatement. The analysis identifies three structural drivers of distortion—regulatory uncertainty, heterogeneous stakeholder scrutiny and gaps in internal reporting capabilities—and examines how managerial sensemaking influences whether disclosure is interpreted as an opportunity or a risk. The European Union serves as an illustrative case to show how dense and evolving regulation can heighten, rather than reduce, interpretive ambiguity. By offering a clearer understanding of the mechanisms behind sustainability disclosure distortion, the article contributes to strategic management research in two ways. First, it clarifies the institutional and organizational dynamics that shape sustainability reporting. Second, it identifies the conditions under which firms are more likely to produce balanced, credible and auditable sustainability disclosure. In a context where the demand for transparency is rising, understanding these dynamics is essential for sustaining legitimacy and improving the quality of sustainability information