Despite apparently supportive national policies, including nation-wide legalization of home birth and coverage by the national health care system of the costs associated with that option, these births account for less than 1% of all births in the Republic of Ireland. Using data collected during participant observation, both in person...
For much of history, U.S. schools have employed ideologies of assimilation and nationhood - involving an exchange of immigrants' ways of life for a homogenous American identity - as frameworks for their curriculum and language education programs. However, a new ideology of multiculturalism has gained popularity in recent decades. Multicultural...
Creative nonfiction is a genre replete with contradictions--the name itself shows that: nonfiction writing is true and factual, but creative writing is imaginative and inventive. Because of fundamental contradictions like this, there is no standardized or even most common definition of the genre. This creates confusion for both critics and...
St. Joseph's College was located within St. Paul, Oregon, the first Roman Catholic mission in the Pacific Northwest. The St. Paul mission was finally established in 1839 by Father Francois Blanchet, four years after the French-Canadian settlers in the area, appropriately known as French Prairie, had requested the presence of...
Small manufacturing firms often serve a domestic market but would like to expand their sales overseas. It is difficult for a small firm to develop overseas contracts and relationships, however, in part because of their small size, and because the advantages of their products may not always be obvious. The...
This thesis explores the use of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits at the Corvallis and Albany, Oregon Farmers' Markets and its role in food access for SNAP participants. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach combining a farmers' market survey and household interviews, the study investigated who uses SNAP at the farmers'...
My thesis explores the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth as emblematic of Western philosophy and literature's longstanding preoccupation with the relationship between mind and matter. The poets' attempts to mediate their languages and sensibilities with "real nature" have a complicated legacy for today's readers, as Romantic literature...
The Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico was home to one of the most intensively-studied archaic states in the New World. Centered at the hilltop city of Monte Albán, the Zapotec State first arose around 500 BC and eventually encompassed much of the present-day state of Oaxaca. But by the Late Classic...
Soil is a valuable medium when investigating the past-- from understanding rates of development, landform evolution, to the construction of various predictive models. Landforms and sediments provide insight into depositional environments and soil morphology indicates pedogenic change within those landforms. The rate at which pedogenesis occurs has been quantitatively measured...
This study examines the theme of power in Naguib Mahfouz's The Cairo Trilogy (1956/57). Contrasting my analysis with earlier review of the novel that emphasized a hegemonic patriarchal power, I argue that such power was constantly subverted by the dominated: family members of the patriarch. Using James C. Scott's notions...
This thesis explores the experiences and negotiations of belonging for children of Mexican migrant farmworkers in Oregon. Ethnographic data was collected over the course of several months with Mexican migrant farmworkers and their children in agricultural fields in Oregon and at Oregon State University. The children in this project have...
The conversation regarding transgender students in the context of women's colleges is inherently complicated due to the binary gender system that the existence of women's colleges reinforce. The primary goal of this phenomenological research was to examine the lived experiences of transgender college students at U.S. women's colleges. Because the...
This research explores the experiences of Iraqi women during and after the 2003 U.S.-led war (2003-2011). The aim of the project was to provide an occasion for a group of Iraqi women to give voice to their lived experiences of war and to document these voices, adding their subjective perspectives...
In this thesis, Elizabeth Summer Wimberly details the profile of generation 1.5 students as a group of students who can need extra support in higher education. Generation 1.5 students stand distinct from both international students and native, monolingual students. As such, placing generation 1.5 students in either a mainstream or...
This paper explores the benefits of a poetry workshop with first-year Latin@ students at Oregon State University. Over the course of nine weeks, participants met once a week for fifty minutes to analyze and discuss culturally relevant poetry as well as compose and revise their own work. Drawing from critical...
With the reauthorization of the 2013 Violence Against Women Act all Title IV higher education institutions will now be required to provide "primary prevention and awareness programs for all incoming students." Yet, more research is needed to find prevention programs that are effective (White House Task Force to Protect Students...
With the rapid development of new computer mediated technologies, instructors have more options of the modalities of responding to student writing. Whereas traditionally, responses have been written by hand, technological developments allow responses to take very different forms. Some of these technologies, such as word processing, mimic the text-on-page techniques...
Over the past decade, the explosion of social media has secured the Internet as a venue for political discussions of all sorts; as well as a realm of consumption and commodification. One population of women that has utilized social media in this way is the plus-sized fashion ("fatshion") community on...
This thesis examines the recent history of the teaching of argument and its implications in the face of new writing standards being implemented in K-12 classrooms under the Common Core State Standards. The new educational policies will shift the focus of writing instruction onto argument writing as part of students'...
After decades of expert-based modernization efforts that have had profound negative impacts on human and environmental health, Ecuador is currently pursuing a rights-based, participatory development paradigm known as sumak kawsay or "the good life". Despite its promises of inclusion and interculturality, this approach continues to rely on highly trained specialists,...
This thesis reports a study of pXRF chemostratigraphy at the Cooper's Ferry site, located in western Idaho’s Lower Salmon River Canyon. The author used portable x-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF) in order to independently test and expand the current chemostratigraphic framework at the site. PXRF applications targeted two stratigraphic sections located...
This thesis explores the artistic imperatives and internal struggles of women painters in two novels, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927). I identify Chopin's Edna Pontellier and Woolf’s Lily Briscoe as painters who exhibit Impressionist strains, both in how they paint and how they...
Limited research has analyzed how the values espoused by Western alternative food systems, such as taste and territoriality, are adopted and refashioned in post-socialist societies. Muscovites now echo the global quality turn that reconnects consumers to their food sources. This research qualitatively explores the perspectives of the cosmopolitan consumers of...
As Turkey's cultural and economic climate has experienced dramatic shifts in accordance with its changing role in global society, a neo-Ottoman movement has taken root in recent years which can offer insight into the new Turkish identity. This sociopolitical movement captures a diverse set of cultural attributes through a contemporary...
Shifting the Scholarly Conversation: A Rhetorical Reading of Peter Elbow's Work explores Peter Elbow's contributions to the field of writing and rhetoric. Over the course of his long career, Elbow’s scholarly and pedagogical work has been much praised and much criticized. Elbow's work has influenced generations of teachers and writers,...
There is a fundamental distortion in our understanding of Native people, especially Native women. This distortion is rooted in imperialism and the colonization of Native lands and has created a dominant/subordinate relationship between Non-Native/Native people. Anthropological life history research has traditionally reflected this relationship. As a Native woman, the author...
For centuries, continental philosophy has clung to the belief that the world only meaningfully exists through human perception--that, in other words, when a tree falls in the forest, it does not make a sound. Literary theory, which has strong roots in continental philosophy, followed suit, remaining tied to humanism even...
This thesis explores the administrative issues that factor into the teaching of writing online. I explore these issues by situating the Conference on College Composition and Communication Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction at the center of this project by both examining and...
My thesis examines a total of fourteen characters from The Portrait of a Lady and The Turn of the Screw. Primarily, I have discovered an overwhelming pattern in these two works by Henry James; when characters make direct entrances--that is when they are not described or discussed in absentia by...
This thesis pursues a flexible understanding and definition of
dis/ability as a broadly and liberally applied mark of stigma. It asks questions that develop a deeper understanding of how disability influences mētis, a knowledge or cunning use of the body. Through this framework of mētis, this thesis explores technologies as...
This thesis examines depictions of medievalism in three central texts: Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and George R.R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. Each of these texts provides an entry point for exploring the ways in which English and American writers have...
This thesis analyzes the efficacy of emancipatory (critical) pedagogical practices in an educational climate of standards-based reform. Using two films noir of the blacklist era--Body and Soul and Crossfire--as the core texts of a unit in a secondary school curriculum, I argue that an emphasis on student agency and a...
The purpose of this study was to determine how the popular writer Wilkie Collins used dress and appearance to bring to light concerns about mental illness in his 1859-60 sensation novel The Woman in White. The method of narrative analysis was used to complete this study. Data sheets were developed...
Tennyson and Hopkins scholarship is dominated by a focus on antithetical dichotomies. Tennyson's speakers are fractured selves focused on the gap between matter and spirit, faith and reason, solitude and community. Likewise, Hopkins' doubled vocation as priest and poet is presented as a contradiction to the point that the transition...
Smallholder farmers in Africa, who have long relied on rain-fed agriculture, are currently experiencing adverse impacts of climate change which is posing serious challenges to their ability to sustain their livelihoods (Morton 2007). This is the case for many other areas around the world, especially among indigenousor ruralcommunities who rely...
This study aims to identify the effect of different lighting conditions and shelf height in a retail store environment on emotional states, feeling of safety and behavioral intentions. Lighting and store fixture height are two retail store components that can affect consumers’ emotional states and therefore their shopping experience.
This...
Knot Theory: In Imitation of Lewis Thomas is a collection of 14, 1200-word essays written in the style of Lewis Thomas, a physician who regularly contributed to The New England Journal of Medicine. His 1200-word column, "Notes of a Biology Watcher," ran from 1971 - 1980. The resulting compilations collectively...
Although electronic medical records systems (EMR) present promising benefits, they have not yet been widely adopted. A problem facing many EMR are that they are disruptive technologies; their complex hardware and software are not designed to account for the clinicians' characteristics and needs, thus, demanding a steep learning curve and...