Elie Wiesel’s Night has become a canonical work in the genre of Holocaust literature. This thesis examines the process by which Night achieved this status. An argument will be composed using, as evidence, analysis of Elie Wiesel’s life, the broad history of Holocaust literature, and the complexities surrounding Night’s publication...
This thesis investigates the effect of participating in political activism on mental health. Participants (N = 187, 72% female, N = 135, 77% female) from an Oregon university were randomly assigned to one of three or four conditions (depending on the study) in which they participated in activism related to...
The present essay discusses themes of dehumanization and reliance on a biomedical model of care within U.S. psychiatric systems in treating individuals diagnosed with psychosis. This model is contrasted with alternative treatment approaches that are person-centered rather than disease-centered. These include Open Dialogue, Soteria, and Hearing Voices Movement. In the...
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of community trust in state systems. Consideration of community concerns by public health agencies may help to establish more equitable policies, engaging community in emergency response and promoting inclusivity and trust. This paper outlines varying definitions of trust, then describes key considerations in...
Music performance and education faced unique barriers during the COVID-19 global pandemic which made it nearly impossible to effectively implement online learning. To better understand these barriers and what improvements might be made during future pandemics that entail periods of isolation, I collected the oral histories of eight Oregon State...
This thesis will compare former OSU Professor Bernard Malamud’s life in Corvallis through primary sources and documents with his parallel experience in his 1961 novel A New Life. A close examination of Malamud’s literature and investigation of his life at OSU exposes an uneven balance between academic censorship and the...
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (ACA) sought to reform the health care system of the United States in a number of key ways, including by expanding access to health insurance to low-income Americans. The legislation provided for the expansion of Medicaid, the jointly funded federal-state public...
Flesh & Blood is a 118-page horror-drama screenplay about a single mother struggling to control her cannibalistic urges while caring for her young daughter and evading an increasingly suspicious detective. Two primary themes of this screenplay are control and motherhood. The protagonist of the film, Christine, grapples with controlling her...
The Bondwoman’s Narrative, the first novel written by an enslaved Black woman, borrows heavily from other texts and genres to investigate what freedom looks like in the context of slavery. Crafts rewrites characters, scenes, and plots, adapting them to her setting and placing herself as a heroine within them. Scholars...
Under the Skin is a collection of short stories that explores how different characters behave when placed in situations that are outside of their control. Stories include “Mirror Image,” which sees a young teen grapple with the fear of being an incorrigibly bad person; “Very Slowly, Then All At Once,”...
Background. Since August of 2016, , more than 119 women and girls have come forward and spoken about the abuse that they faced at the hands of USA Gymnastics, Michigan State University, and Lawrence Nassar.
Methods. I reviewed 16 primary sources to describe athlete-identified themes (“bins”) associated with gymnastics reform....
Through the creation of a children’s book, this project aims to educate children and adults about the act of banning books in the United States. This non-fiction picture book targets readers between four and ten years old. Research on the history of book banning and questions about why it happens...
This research aims to understand the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic had on the workplace, with an emphasis on the design of the physical space. The research uses primarily qualitative data from relevant literature, survey data, and interviews conducted with professionals in the field. The results show that hybrid working...
This project analyzes how women have radically changed the world of western print in the 21st century. To conduct this analysis, I examine a series of oral history interviews that I conducted in 2020 with women printers on the West Coast and employ a critical feminist methodology to study the...
Homosexual men in Nazi Germany experienced legal and social oppression that was rooted in both the cultural homophobia of Twentieth Century Germany and the existential homophobia of high-ranking Nazi officials. However, the Nazi Regime’s enforcement of homonegative policy was not unilateral, often ignoring the actions of members of Nazi-affiliated groups....
This studies the participants in Black Lives Matter-related communication on the social media app TikTok and the content they posted. Using grounded theory, the information gathered from Black Lives Matter TikTok videos was analyzed to determine the goals of the content creators, as well as the feasibility of community dialogue...
One of the main ways that one can accurately gain knowledge of the experiences of students on a college campus is to talk to the students themselves. In this study, we used Photovoice, a participatory action approach, to help better understand the experiences of the students at Oregon State University...
Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is one of the most widely read novels written by an Oregonian. A mute Native American, a boisterous Irish white man, and numerous African Americans working behind the scenes of the narrative all converge in this struggle for autonomy. Little to no...
Women’s history is often not included in K-12 classes. However, women are an essential part of American history and should be better represented in the K-12 curricula and classrooms. The purpose of this thesis is to both acknowledge that women’s history is often missing in K-12 classrooms and to provide...
This study examines healthcare policy preferences of Oregon State University students through the lens of Political Culture Theory, as pioneered by Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky in the 1980’s. The primary goal of this study is to examine the impact of cultural traits as described by Political Culture Theory on...
The nucleocapsid of SARS-CoV-2 is critical for viral genome packaging through binding to viral genomic RNA. Liquid-liquid phase separation, or LLPS, is the formation of microscopic, rapidly reversible, liquid-like immiscible droplets. There is increasing scientific evidence that LLPS underlies the formation of membraneless compartments within cells and that this process...
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is known for altering the social and political landscape of the United States during a particularly tumultuous, divided period. The novel, which tells the story of enslaved man Uncle Tom, had wide influence and was considered to help “lay the groundwork for the Civil...
Since underrepresented nominees began filling U.S. Supreme Court seats, political scientists have examined the possibility of existing biases towards potential judges based upon their identities or innate characteristics. Some scholars have identified that the gender identification and ethnic affiliations of candidates have affected the behaviors displayed by those involved in...
This paper looks into the participants in Black Lives Matter-related communication on the social media app TikTok and the content they posted. Using grounded theory, the information gathered from Black Lives Matter TikTok videos was analyzed to determine the goals of the content creators, as well as the feasibility of...
This thesis explores how students can find Shakespeare relevant in this modern technological society by creating and editing two podcasts that summarize two well known Shakespeare plays, Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Interviews are also included from Oregon State University students to see their perspectives from reading...
The National Pygmy Goat Association is a hobby livestock organization founded in 1975. Over the past five decades, it has grown in size and importance, occupying a niche role as the primary breed registry and certification authority for the smallest domestic ruminant. This history attempts to capture the scope of...
This book manuscript is a comprehensive guide to a lesser known part of Oregon's history, primarily during the Gold Rush of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. With the most ghost towns out of any other state, Oregon's picturesque remains of these fascinating places are detailed through photography, personal...
Interruptions and asking questions play a vital role in social communication and can exhibit status and power differences in regular conversation. Studies in gender communication describe the way men and women utilize their own linguistic register through the development of social subcultures. The different ways men and women report and...
While seemingly harmless, stereotypes can play a significant role in prejudice and discrimination. In two studies, we examined stereotypes of Asian American women and how they may vary with different clothing types. We used a mixed factorial design with a sample of college students from a U.S. university. In the...
The WNBA is a league that has been characterized by struggle ever since its inception in 1996. The biggest reason for nearly all of its problems lies with one source: money. The WNBA simply does not have enough money to make it a functionable professional sports league. As a result...
Advances in technology such as 3D digital scanning and spatial analysis software have provided archaeologists with novel data. Specifically, these methods increase the researcher's ability to measure artifact morphology and past networks of cultural transmission, to potentially track the movement of past peoples and ideas through space and time. This...
The purpose of this study was to examine how fearful and self-conscious shyness subtypes are related to shame, dissociation, and PTSD following traumatic experiences. We hypothesized self-conscious shyness, characterized by feelings of embarrassment and fear of public scrutiny, to be related to symptoms of high betrayal. We predicted fearful shyness,...
The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted most institutions and individuals in some capacity, and college students are no different. The unique perceptions and experiences of college students during the COVID-19 pandemic has the potential to be interesting social phenomena that could prove useful for institutions such as universities, governments, and public...
Christian communities vary widely in their degrees of acceptability or apprehensiveness toward newly developing technologies, ultimately aiming to help individuals optimally grow in their relationships to God and with others. Technologies viewed as conducive to accomplishing these goals are more likely to be accepted by Christian communities. Technologies viewed as...
This project examines the portrayal of the life and times of Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich (Empress Elisabeth of Austria) in the popular Austrian musical "Elisabeth das Musical" (Elisabeth the Musical), written by Michael Kunze and Sylvester Levay. "Elisabeth" was first performed in Vienna in 1992 and has since become the...
Being human is often portrayed as desirable in fiction. Many fictional beings, particularly robots and androids, seek out being human as a goal. Although current robotics is not advanced enough for robots and androids to be deemed sentient, the world of fiction is quickly becoming reality. With the integration of...
Background: Individuals rapidly infer character traits and behaviors through the process of facial perception. Perceptions of trustworthiness, accurate or not, completed by authorities in the criminal justice system may have implications for individuals suspected of crimes, including harsher or longer sentencing decisions. Objective: The present study concerned how the presence...
This study sought to understand the unique challenges that housing insecurity programs faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. An anonymous Qualtrics survey, containing closed- and open-ended questions, was sent to housing insecurity programs in Benton County, Oregon. Questions focused on how the COVID-19 pandemic affected services and how programs adjusted to...
Black Mirror and The Twilight Zone have each left their mark on popular culture. Charlie Brooker and Rod Serling created television shows with macabre and imaginative concepts and brought them to the small screen. “This is like something straight out of The Twilight Zone!” has become a common phrase since...
The relationship between partisan gerrymandering and voter participation has still not been fully understood. Although it is clear that there are many factors that affect voter participation, the effect of gerrymandering on voter participation still has not been studied. In this study, I will be examining if partisan gerrymandering affects...
In ethnographic research, an anthropologist becomes integrated in the community of their study. Throughout this process, the anthropologist adapts to the cultural practices and the language of this community, becoming intimately connected to them. Ethnography communicates, through the anthropologist’s experience, crucial practices, tensions, and values discovered during research. However, it...
The Reconstruction era, beginning in 1863, was a time of radical change and movement in American politics and society. A significant number of northern Republicans migrated southwards, for various purposes, including political involvement. To white Democratic southerners who believed they had just fought a war of northern aggression and now...
When people talk about the one-child policy in China, it always relates to topics like human rights violations or the population control dilemma. The one-child policy was published in the 1980s, around the same time as the Economic Reform, and these twin policies brought Chinese society tremendous changes. This paper...
This thesis begins with an overview of the history of rock climbing that presents the opportunity to evaluate rock climbing as a religion/religious act in Section 2. Then, Section 2 delves into alternative spaces where religion exists beyond mainstream institutions, in order to build upon some themes of religious experience...
This project explores how science fiction can be used to examine social justice issues in our contemporary world. I will explore two case studies from the Star Wars: The Clone Wars television series through a framework of race, empire, and orientalism. Walidah Imarisha’s notion of “visionary fiction” is utilized as...
This thesis attempts to identify and develop a new narrative structure that has not yet been identified. This structure, which traces a character’s internal process of change throughout a work of literature, is known as the Awakening Arc. The Awakening Arc has seven stages that loosely correspond to Freytag’s external...
The WWC family consists of three proteins‐ KIBRA/WWC1, WWC2, and WWC3. The three proteins share a similar primary structure and interact with a common set of proteins. Each paralog contains two WW domains which recognize proline‐rich sequences of the type PPxY (P is proline, Y is tyrosine, x is any...
I always knew I was interested in the criminal justice system, evident from the hours I spent as a child binge watching Law & Order, Rizzoli and Isles, and Dateline when my parents weren’t home. I very nearly pursued criminal justice as a major, but ended up going a different...
In America’s polarized politics, the language that congresspeople use matters. This thesis examines the use of bipartisan communications—in tweets and press releases—of members of the US House of Representatives as an electoral strategy for representatives in districts of varying competitiveness. A linear regression was conducted to analyze the relationship between...
Shabbat B’shir is an album exploring Jewish folk and rock music written, performed, produced, recorded, and mixed and mastered all by Max Winer. The goal of the project was to create a full length album showcasing Max Winer’s growth in songwriting and production capabilities. This eleven song album features the...