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A Wicked Game
Get PDFA Wicked Game is an installation comprised of a video game in an arcade cabinet, photographs, sound, and sculpture. The installation explores the complexity of play and personal memory. Working from the concept of “wicked” (Epstein) learning environments – domains with hidden rules, unstable structures, and inconsistent feedback – the project constructs a playable space, where players must navigate an inhospitable environment, echoing the experience of living in a world that resists accommodation.
The installation centers around an all-black arcade cabinet placed in a darkened gallery space, inviting visitors to play A Wicked Game. The game demands the player know things which are never taught, demands that they contort themselves to a constantly changing control scheme, and success requires mastery combined with luck. The narrator is deliberately inhospitable. The game’s mechanics disorient and confuse, both repelling and enticing the player.
Other works in the exhibition reinforce themes of loss, memory, and uncertainty. Personal storytelling is interwoven with scholarly discourse and design research, positioning the work as both autobiographical and theoretical.
A Wicked Game traverses an artistic practice informed by game logic, resisting clarity and embracing complexity. It invites players to reflect on what it means to inhabit systems that are unstable, arbitrary, and often unjust to imagine new forms of cooperative play and shared empathy
Mindful Symbiotic Ecosystems. Designing for Women in Remote Workspaces
Get PDFWomen represent 61% of designers in the workforce but hold only 29% of leadership roles. This disparity highlights a critical need for an ecosystem that removes barriers and cultivates mentorship, community, and leadership among women (Bolt, 2020). Even though women have proven their ability to succeed in male-dominated corporate cultures, the real question is not about capability but sustainability. Driven by overwork, competition, and burnout, the workplace does not just push women out; it leads to long-term instability for the entire organization (Krivkovich et al., 2024). In the workplace, a culture of masculinity reinforces harmful, outdated mindsets and glorifies aggressive, relentless overachievement at the expense of well-being (Stanaland, 2025). The current masculine corporate structure, driven by competition, ego, and hierarchy, imposes financial pressures, societal expectations, and workplace discrimination stressors that lead to burnout (Nagoski et al., 2019). Mindfulness provides a path to feminist leadership by challenging power structures and centering well-being. As a skill and a mindset, mindfulness fosters awareness of mental, emotional, and physical processes, helping individuals cultivate self-care and care for others (Mindful Leader, 2021). A feminist leadership model built on mindfulness rejects perfectionism and overachievement. Mindfulness redefines success as self-determination, redefining winning and failures, and allowing individuals to lead with empathy, gratitude, and motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000). Rather than framing leadership as a contest, this research evaluates how psychological safety and physical health can be prioritized through a sustainable feminist practice. This investigation proposes a mindfulness-based feminist framework integrating leadership and workplace sustainability. Through these frameworks, this investigation outlines how prototypes of corporate systems can create opportunities for security, unlocking creativity, innovation, and meaningful collaboration. Mindfulness, as a feminist leadership approach, redefines success not through competition but through care, inclusion, and collective well-being. Reimagining a future that values mindfulness in the workplace that brings feminist principles of collaboration, care, and empathy (Armbrust, 2016). This isn’t just about gender; it’s about the future of work itself
Examining Stable Isotope Variation of Herbivores in South Luangwa Valley in the Context of Anthropogenic Influences
No full textStable isotopes are an effective tool for inferring mammalian behavior. Though there are multiple factors that can influence mammalian diets, anthropogenic influence is one that is often overlooked. For example, it is important to consider how wildlife living in areas where there are frequent, documented human-wildlife interactions will modify behavior. National Parks (NPs) are a great example of this because of the common misconception that since there are protections in place, that means it is devoid of anthropogenic influence. South Luangwa National Park contradicts this misconception. Though there are protections for wildlife in place within the park, it is unfenced and allows for the movement of animals from within to outside of the park. On the border of the national park is a village, Mfuwe, which is located near the entrance of the park. There are known human-wildlife conflicts (HWCs) in the area, which define any negative interaction between humans and wildlife. Notably, one of the frequent interactions is crop raiding. Since stable isotopes of carbon (δ13C) and nitrogen (δ15N) inform us broadly about the diet of the individual, then behaviors like crop raiding would result in values that differ from individuals who did not engage in that behavior. The general and spatial variation in isotopic niche space at the species level were analyzed from seven large mammal groups in order to test this hypothesis. From these large mammal groups, the majority of individuals fell within the mixed feeder category, and there was a noted shift towards a higher integration of C4 resources as you move away from Mfuwe and the park entrance
Literary Postcritique and American Transcendentalism: Helping Students Practice Community-Building by Rewilding Literature in the Classroom
Get PDFLiterary postcritique is an emergent theoretical approach to literature that has elicited skepticism among many in academia because of its central claim that their unchecked overreliance on suspicious and symptomatic reading styles is diminishing the pedagogical potential of our reading together. To restore this potential, Rita Felski, a champion of literary postcritique, suggests adopting an aesthetic reading style, a mid-level interpretation that neither indulges in the formalists’ habits of close scrutiny nor in the cultural critics’ wider lens of political and social contexts. In The Limits of Critique and Hooked, Felski argues that an aesthetic reading style can develop in students vital relational understandings and re-sensitize them to shared affective experiences in their classrooms’ discursive communities. For this project, I suggest that Felski’s twenty-first-century post-critical option echoes the reformative work of a certain stripe of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers: the American Transcendentalists. This project’s goal is to emphasize the democratic value of Felski’s work by translating the approach of literary postcritique into terms of American Transcendentalism. Its comparison of Felski’s theoretical approach and Henry David Thoreau’s ethical practices reveals that both provide readers with opportunities to reorient themselves within diverse social networks, improve their caring skills of attention, understanding, and responsiveness, and rescale viable, sustainable social reform to effect change through small, everyday interactions. These similarities serve to repackage literary postcritique and aesthetic reading styles as worthy of their skeptics’ reconsideration. The project concludes with an invitation to reimagine curriculum, instruction, and assessment in ways that align with Felski and Thoreau’s sincerest ambition: to repair our sociality
Using Deep Learning and Two-Photon Excitation Fluorescence Microscopy to Predict Breast Cancer Recurrence and Response to Chemotherapy
No full textAccurate prediction of breast cancer recurrence plays a critical role in guiding treatment decisions, particularly regarding the use of systemic therapy for patients. While genomic assays such as the Oncotype DX Recurrence Score offer valuable prognostic information, they are limited in accessibility and application. The work presented in this thesis explores an imaging-based approach for the prediction of breast cancer recurrence that combines multiphoton microscopy (MPM) with deep learning to classify individual breast cancer biopsy samples by risk of recurrence. Genomic differences in tumors with different recurrence potentials may translate to distinct optical and structural information that can be captured by MPM techniques and subsequently extracted by deep learning models. Deep learning, particularly in the form of convolutional neural networks (CNNs), has proven to be a powerful tool in biomedical image analysis in areas such as image segmentation and disease classification. In this work, a custom CNN was designed and trained on MPM autofluorescence images of breast cancer core needle biopsy samples, using Oncotype DX Recurrence Scores as a ground truth for classification. This model was refined and evaluated on multiple combinations of training inputs through a robust cross-validation approach to ensure consistent performance across the entire dataset. Several combinations of image inputs led to highly accurate classifications, suggesting that the CNN is able to detect complex patterns in the MPM images that correspond to risk of breast cancer recurrence
The Ghost Children
No full textThe Ghost Childrenis a young adult historical novel, the first fictional work in prose to tell the story of Action T4, Nazi Germany’s mass murder program targeting people with disabilities. Told in alternating chapters by a blind teenager and her older brother, this is the story of Hitler’s forgotten victims: their struggle to survive, fight back, and find love.
Seventeen-year-old Eva Schreiber is totally blind from birth and considers herself a loyal Nazi, until she learns that Hitler’s government considers people like her “life unworthy of life” and is forced to face the worst of the Third Reich’s evil. With her parents dead, she lives at St. Anna’s Home for Handicapped Girls while her older brother Dietrich, an officer in the Waffen-SS, is off at war. But in the summer of 1941, Dietrich comes home on leave and warns Eva that St. Anna’s is closing and the girls will be moved to the dangerous hospital of Sonnenstein, promising that he has a plan to protect her. Dietrich and his girlfriend, a young nurse named Greta Zimmermann, get Eva and three friends out of the killing center by faking their deaths.
In hiding with a group of teens with a variety of physical and mental disabilities, Eva wrestles with her Nazi upbringing and falls in love with Alaric Drescher, a crippled pilot who attempted suicide after an accident. The teens grow more comfortable with their own disabilities and undertake a nocturnal anti-Nazi graffiti campaign under the name Ghost Children that puts the entire resistance network at risk.
When Dietrich\u27s romance with Greta becomes public knowledge and his best friend and fellow soldier grows suspicious, his double life as resistance leader and SS officer unravels. As he\u27s forced toward further complicity with Nazi atrocities, Dietrich searches for a way to save his sister without losing himself. But just when the network has a plan to sneak the fugitives into Switzerland, a devastating betrayal threatens all of them
Foreword
Get PDFThe 2024 Arkansas Law Review Symposium, Embracing the Past, Enhancing the Future: Exploring the Evolution of Legal Education, was a prominent event in the University of Arkansas School of Law’s Centennial Speaker Series. As the School of Law celebrated its 100th anniversary, it seemed an appropriate time to focus our collective attention on critical and emerging issues: recent developments in bar admission processes, shifts in accreditation standards, online legal education, approaches to Artificial Intelligence in the classroom and the profession, and the newly developed NextGen Bar exam
The Rural Rescue: Tackling Arkansas’s Legal Deserts Through Proven Statutory Reform
Get PDFIn some rural counties of Arkansas, a single attorney is responsible for serving thousands of residents, depriving many Arkansans of even basic legal representation. Imagine facing eviction, fighting for custody of your child, contesting a divorce, or navigating the complexities of probate with no attorney for miles. This stark reality exemplifies the growing “legal deserts” problem facing rural Arkansas, where access to justice has become a luxury rather than a right. To combat the growing shortage of legal professionals in rural areas, states seek new solutions—some proving more successful than others. Several states have implemented rural attorney incentive programs, typically managed by their respective judicial branches or bar associations. Such programs, alongside scholarships, fellowships, and incubator projects, aim to attract and retain lawyers in underserved, rural communities. This Note examines the ongoing rural legal desert crisis in Arkansas and proposes that the state adapt its rural physician recruitment program to increase the presence of Arkansas lawyers in rural communities. It also considers how Arkansas can implement elements from other states’ successful incentive programs for rural attorneys to further enhance efforts to address its legal deserts problem. Section II seeks to provide background on Arkansas’s legal landscape, compare rural attorney incentive programs from other states, and explore the state’s rural practice incentive model for physicians. Section III suggests a solution, proposing that Arkansas adapt its statutory rural physician program to create a parallel model for attorneys, while also addressing potential implementation barriers. Section IV concludes with a call to action, urging Arkansas lawmakers and the legal community to explore the proposed solution and expand access to justice in rural areas
Redefining Children’s Experience in Social Services Offices
Get PDFThe effects of childhood trauma are far-reaching and diverse, influencing physical, emotional, and mental health across a child’s entire lifetime. Research indicates that children who experience adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as abuse or neglect are at an increased risk for various consequences and that the environments they encounter post-trauma play a significant role in shaping their experiences. Social services offices, where many traumatized children are taken for interviews or assessments after being removed from their homes, can often become places of additional distress. This project seeks to address this issue by proposing redesigns for social services offices to create safer, more welcoming environments for children. By incorporating trauma-informed design principles, this project aims to minimize the potential for further emotional turmoil caused by the physical environments children encounter.
To achieve this, a generative artificial intelligence (AI) model has been developed and integrated into a free-access website. This website allows the user to upload images of their current office and receive AI-generated redesign suggestions that are backed by the literature. The AI tool, coupled with resources and other supplemental information provided in the website, is a complete and easy-to-use resource for offices seeking to make positive changes for the children and families they serve. This project draws inspiration from non-profit organizations such as LilyPad Inc., which has demonstrated the power of child-focused spaces in reducing trauma. The website is intended to be a free and accessible resource for social workers and other professionals in Northwest Arkansas and beyond, with the hope that it will inspire change both locally and nationwide. By offering a tangible solution to creating trauma-informed offices, this project aims to enhance the well-being of children and ensure that they are met with office spaces that support their healing, rather than spaces that could cause further distress or harm
Improving Cervical Cancer Screening in Rural Primary Care: A Quality Improvement DNP Project
Get PDFAbstract
Purpose This quality improvement project addresses the inconsistencies in patient identification of those indicated for cervical cancer screening and targets provider practice change to improve screening rates. The purpose of this project is to standardize the cervical cancer screening practice in a rural health clinic system to increase the rate of screening.
Methods A paired samples comparison was used to measure the difference in participating providers’ number of cervical cancer screenings pre and post implementation.
Results Despite seeing nearly 5% fewer patients within the intended population, the screening practice remained consistent at nearly 3% of all encounters before and after implementation.
Conclusion Improving the clinical workflow and identification of eligible patients to promote better rates of CCS is possible with chart review and feedback, but additional measures are needed to further increase the rate significantly