Browsing Master's Theses by Title
Now showing items 7113-7132 of 14835
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I Am The Space Where I Am: An Arts-Informed Autoethnographic Inquiry on Place-Conscious Education In The CommunityThis thesis investigates how my representations of experience through arts-informed autoethnographic research are significant in establishing the pedagogical nature of place. I seek to understand how place-conscious education in a community setting can encourage students' relationships with the spaces they inhabit and lend to a more just learning environment. Many educative tools are provided and analyzed which are derived from wayfinding and psychogeographic methods. Data was collected over two months throughout the Summer of 2015 while participating in the Onward Israel service learning program in Israel and Palestine. My digital photographs and excerpts of stream-of-consciousness style poetry serve as the data set to illuminate the rich sensory encounters and art making processes indicative of experiential learning. This context-driven artwork encourages questions and dialogue about sociopolitical conflict and wars, migration and occupation. It is concerned with physical as well as psychological borders, checkpoints and boundaries. I utilized poetic and photographic inquiry as well as cognitive mapping to explore how concepts of travel are intricately linked to practices of self-reflexivity, community building and alternative curricula development outside of the formal classroom setting. This qualitative data is not a strictly defined set of interviews or statistics. Instead, vignettes of a more totalizing experience can be extracted, analyzed, dissected and/or rearranged. It is an exploration of identity, agency and untraditional ways of knowing the self/Other. I underscore how new pathways and possibilities for teaching emerge from a greater acceptance and validation of experiential knowledge and an attuned consciousness to place.
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“I Can’t Dance in Two Weddings”: Marriage as an Articulation of Emerging and Transforming Fractures in the Iraqi Ezidi Refugee Community in GermanyAs a lens for analyzing the frictions in the Iraqi Ezidi refugee community in Germany, I consider marriage as a lived daily reality, an idealized concept, and ritualized life cycle event. I evaluate the ways tensions between Ezidis and between Ezidis and non-Ezidis are enacted through these myriad aspects of marriage. In addition to exploring the particular ways these tensions have emerged, been strengthened, or transformed within the Ezidi refugee community and between non-Ezidi others, this paper argues that Ezidi refugees are uniquely situated to highlight the loss and precarity created by migration even when the community in question has been bestowed a certain amount of privilege vis-à-vis other migrant groups inside of Germany and in other countries. The numerous topics that are increasingly dividing the community include marriage rules, traditional authority structures, caste tensions, connections to Kurdish culture and politics, thoughts on the influence of Islam on Ezidism, and what it means to be a “good” Ezidi. The fractures that emerge around these topics divide the community along region of heritage, generational, gender, and class lines. In analyzing these fractures, I emphasize the overwhelming sense of instability in the Iraqi Ezidi refugee community and argue that this instability is enhanced by the political acts of the German government and the governments or leaders from back home, including but not limited to the Kurdish political parties and the Iraqi central government.
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I relate to the sense of not belonging: Native American perspectives of homelessnessResponses of ten Native American men, who reported being homeless for at least six months, waiver slightly from the hypothesis that their concept of home denotes community, family, and an indigenous connection to the land. However, they did strategically cope to create home-like atmospheres. Direct answers show that home provides basic necessities, safety, and emotions of well-being, like belonging. Scrutiny of the complete contexts of these men's lives show that friendship often replaced a lack of family. Some participants referred to an indigenous connection to the land and to home as being more than one place, including a natal reservation. Adoption and a period of time away from culture, an uprootedness, also characterized these lives. Researcher recommendations include a permanent wet/dry residence, a camping area, and provisions for more culturally specific homeless services.
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"I've needed a friend my whole life". Voices offormer gang members: An ethnodramaThis thesis set about to achieve three goals. First it discusses street gang research, assessment of the gang problem, and in particular the forces that push and pull American youths into the street gang lifestyle and the gang member experience. Second, it explores how alternative forms of data presentation, such as ethnodrama, blur the boundary lines between art and scientific research and demonstrates that the embodiment of human experience through artistic means enhances our understanding of the gang problem and creates context. Third, it includes an ethnodrama text constructed from qualitative interviews of three former gang members, in support of narrative inquiry research methods, and illustrating how three young men were drawn into the gang lifestyle, what they experienced by being in a gang, and the factors that helped them to leave the gang and lead them to make positive changes in their lives.
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IC defect detection using color information and image processingMost current commercial automated IC inspection systems use gray-level or binary images for IC defect detection in spite of the fact that color permits defect detection where gray-level information is insufficient. Three color image processing techniques including the spectral-spatial clustering, principal components, and hue-saturation-value (HSV) color features have been investigated to evaluate the usefulness of color for IC defect detection. The AMOEBA spectral-spatial clustering algorithm, an un-supervised color segmentation approach, with a sequence of image processing procedures resulted in segmentation results with high accuracy and discriminated successfully an isolated and homogeneous defect with an unique color signature. The principal components transformation and the HSV color features, two color enhancement/separation algorithms, have proven useful for enhancing and isolating weak spectral signatures in the defect regions. The results of this investigation into the use of color are promising.
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'Ideal Vehicles': Medallic Circuitry in Nineteenth-Century Portraits of Native AmericansI examine the mobility and circulation of peace medals featured in nineteenth-century portraiture of Native Americans through the lens of object-oriented ontology. This research strives to establish a different perspective for considering nineteenth-century portraiture of Native Americans by situating the works through the framework of materiality and circulation. By applying this approach to a series of portraits of Native Americans with peace medals, my research seeks to define issues of movement and power within the transient, fluctuating space of the nineteenth-century American frontier. To accomplish this, I trace the production and distribution of peace medals within paintings widely viewed at the time, as well as the movement of groups and individuals involved with transporting and receiving the medals. Tracking these objects and their mechanisms of movement within the visual culture of the nineteenth century, indicating not only the thing itself but also its processes of production and movement, reveals a dimension of specificity to pictorial narratives, even as the exhibited artworks promoted generalized ideals regarding Indian policy through their circulation. I follow the peace medals’ logistics of production and transit to underscore issues of value and currency on the American frontier, highlighting the ways in which peace medals and the artwork depicting them participated in narratives of Native displacement.
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Identification and clinical validation of defining characteristics of the nursing diagnosis alteration in tissue perfusion: PeripheralThis descriptive study used the Diagnostic Content Validity (DCV) and the Clinical Diagnostic Validation (CDV) models proposed by Fehring (1986) to clinically identify and validate the defining characteristics for Alteration in Tissue Perfusion: Peripheral. The Peripheral Vascular Assessment Tool (PVAT) was designed as the data collection tool; the DCV of the PVAT was 0.75. Twenty subjects, 18 years old and older, were selected from a population who were admitted as in-patients in one rural southwestern hospital. Data were collected through patient interviews, independent nurse assessment, and review of medical records. The CDV score for the validated tool was 0.62. No major defining characteristics and six minor defining characteristics were clinically validated. Differences in defining characteristics were found in the subjects with arterial occlusive disease and those with venous occlusive disease. Findings are applicable to nursing practice and research.
