Community engagement programs are shaped by the educators who facilitate them. Due to a curtailed critical consciousness, such programs are not always sensitive to the negative implications for the communities they are attempting to support. Guided by critical ethnographic and interpretive phenomenological analysis, this study examines how…

Remote scientific research settings embody a long-term combination of extreme conditions, physical boundedness, and blurred boundaries among work, play, and sleep that challenge traditional notions of how individuals perceive and interact with infrastructure. In such settings, individuals often use creative outlets to form social bonds with…

The purpose of the research was to explore how female nutrition/dietetics majors at a large, Midwestern university, with a caregiving role in their home, interpreted their roles in home foodwork, how their formally acquired nutrition knowledge influenced that role, and how they saw their role in home foodwork shaping their careers. These future…

Despite the proliferation of distance education at colleges and universities and its increases in student enrollments, experts warn that unless significant changes are made, distance education's future may become threatened (Cavanaugh, 2004; Howard & Schenk, 2004; Porter, 2004; Zemsky & Massy, 2004; Carr, 2001; Carnevale, 2001). These…

Many school-age children who come to the United States from other countries find the shift in home, community, and institutional constructs to be a challenge (Cairney, 2002; Derderian-Aghajanian & Wang, 2012). Despite this, these children and their families bring significant strengths, resources, and rich funds of knowledge to the table. This…

Science, already a massive and global enterprise, continues to grow in both size and complexity. Accompanying this growth is a deluge of data on scientific activity and advancements in computational techniques that open new avenues for its analysis. Leveraging these new data and techniques, the field of "Science of Science" turns the…

Students tend to perform at the academic level expected of them. Although most expectation research has centered investigation of decontextualized teacher-student dyads to understand whether students behaviorally confirm their teacher's expectation, we now know that expectations operate at whole-group or system levels. Since underestimation is…

In this phenomenological, qualitative study, the researcher analyzed the lived experiences of Latin American immigrant students in the current school culture in Long Island schools. The purpose of this analysis was to identify a relationship between the school culture and social structure with the academic advancement and overall development of…

"What is the role of higher knowledge and education in molding the individual and in creating certain attributes of the individual?" The attributes of the individual in question are derived from Marx and they signify an individual who is autonomous, free and capable to determine her own future and discover and actualize her own kinds of…

This qualitative interpretive study examined the experiences of student conduct administrators using restorative justice conferences at American Catholic colleges and universities, as well as the role of restorative justice conferences in strengthening Catholic Social Teaching through such student conduct processes. At its heart, restorative…

This dissertation is comprised of three separate manuscripts. Each manuscript concerns questions of social structure in relation to health, morbidity, and mortality. The first examines the epidemiologic theories taught most frequently in core master of public health coursework and proposes curricular changes to better engage with the structural…

This dissertation comprises three essays that explore the relationship between knowledge and social structure through an examination of the use of science in the culinary arts and finance. The first two of these essays focus on how science has influenced practices and social structure within the culinary arts; the final essay provides a comparison…

Through colonialism, external forces can alter and shift social structures and practices. It causes trans-generational, often normalized, invisible, and profound marginalization of the collective identities of local and indigenous populations. Decolonization is the resisting and undoing of colonial impacts. It's the process of reforming a…

Microaggressions in the higher education setting are a pervasive issue frequently encountered by members of marginalized cultures. The experience of microaggressions can result in negative outcomes on neural substrates, mental health, emotional health, and physical health. Furthermore, academic microaggressions can impact performance, learning,…

For years now, reports by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) on local and national community colleges consistently show how the number of Black faculty employed at community colleges is relatively lower than the number of White faculty. Recent data show that Black faculty represent only 7.4% of all instructional staff in community…