Dissertations
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Pokot and Western Christian Missions: A Postcolonial Story of Place and Perception
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)In 1931, after decades of British colonial control, the first Western Christian missionaries came to Pokot, the region inhabited by the pastoralist Pokot people in western Kenya and eastern Uganda. For the past ninety ... -
A Behavioral Economic Approach to Preventing Adolescent Violence
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)Youth violence is a serious public health and criminal justice concern that disproportionately affects African American and Hispanic/Latinx youth. Prevention Science researchers have identified co-occurring behaviors and ... -
Clinical Assessment of Tinnitus Following Concussion
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-21)People who experience tinnitus after a concussion represent some of the most challenging clinical cases to see. However, little is known about the underlying mechanisms of this symptom. Concussion may facilitate tinnitus ... -
“Right to Painless Death”: The Fight for Humane Animal Slaughter in the Cold War United States
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)During the 1950s, animal welfare advocates launched a campaign for the passage of a law to require the use of improved slaughtering methods in packinghouses across America. The campaign ignited a widespread debate between ... -
Cross-Saving in the Classroom: The Intersections of Transfer and Game-Based Learning
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)This dissertation seeks to discover and examine the intersections between writing knowledge transfer and game-based learning. Writing knowledge transfer represents one of the ultimate goals of composition pedagogy: the ... -
Fire and fungi: fungal ecology in pyrophilic ecosystems
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)Fire is a global phenomenon that annually burns approximately 3% of Earth’s terrestrial surface. While fire is an important component of many terrestrial ecosystems, climate change and anthropogenic influence are expected ... -
Stubborn Structures: Revaluing Masculinity in Mexican Women-Authored “novelas sobre la Revolución” (1963-2010)
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)The 1910 Mexican Revolution is one of the most important and most represented events in 20th-century Mexican history. Although narratives written by men about men on the battlefield dominated representation in the first ... -
Worlding Modernism: The Political, the Postcolonial, and the Modern Body
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)This dissertation contends that the population one belongs to shapes their relation to the modern state. State laws and power structures allow lives to flourish, or neglect people or kill them, based on classifications of ... -
Examining the Effects of a Home Usability Intervention on Community and Home Participation
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)The usability of a person’s home is central to community living. In order to participate in the community, a person must be able to first bathe, dress, and leave home (Stineman et al., 2007). Unfortunately, however, the ... -
A Longitudinal Case Study: Language Abilities of Minority Autistic Young Adults
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)One aim in clinical research is furthering understanding of linguistic variation across populations. While important for understanding language acquisition in the context of human development, little is known about the ... -
Bloom and Bust: A Political Ecology of Jellyfish Fisheries on the Miskitu Coast of Nicaragua
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)The environment, economy, and culture of the Caribbean (Miskitu) Coast of Nicaragua have been fundamentally shaped, since the colonial period, by boom-and-bust extractive natural resource industries. Coastal residents, ... -
Technology-Based Contingency Management for Walking to Prevent Prolonged Periods of Sitting in the Workplace
(University of Kansas, 2021-01-01)Sedentary behavior is an emerging public health issue. The workplace is one variable contributing to the rising amount of sedentary time, where a growing number of individuals are employed in positions with primarily ... -
Local Modifications of Interfaces and Electronic Properties on the Molecular Scale with Scanning Probe Microscopy
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)The nanoscience field is shifting focus from characterizing and synthesizing novel nanomaterials, to incorporating nanomaterials into functional devices for photovoltaic, energy, and sensing applications. Furthermore, ... -
Study of the phase dynamics in moderately damped Josephson junctions and its applications
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)The observation of macroscopic quantum tunneling (MQT) manifests the quantumness of macroscopic variables, such as the phase difference across a Josephson junction (JJ). Since then, MQT has become a hallmark experiment to ... -
Biogeographic plant-microbe patterns and process: natural and anthropogenic impacts across three spatial scales
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)The plant microbiome is essential to the maintenance of plant community structure and diversity. In addition, anthropogenic forces are altering these long-standing relationships. Despite the importance of the plant microbiome ... -
Optimization of flavin oxidase enzymes for human health monitoring
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)Biosensors are an analytic modality able to quantify, in real time, the abundance of specific analytes in complex biological mixtures such as blood, the brain, and in a variety of organs. However, the use of biosensors has ... -
The Prudential Significance of Care
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)Prudence is a domain of action-evaluation, specifically concerned with the agent herself, in particular, with the agent’s own welfare. For instance, if an agent can benefit either herself or a stranger, then in terms of ... -
Mathematical modeling, estimation and application in finance
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)Parameter estimation has wide applications in such fields as finance, oil deposit detection,etc. In this dissertation, we discuss the parameter estimation problems in a stochastic differential equation and a partial ... -
ELUCIDATION OF PROTEIN-PROTEIN AND PROTEIN-SMALL MOLECULE INTERACTIONS IN THE TYPE III SECRETION SYSTEM
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)Many biological processes are characterized by transient and weak interactions. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is a powerful tool to characterize these interactions on a per-residue basis. In this dissertation, I have ... -
Limit distributions for Skorohod integrals and spatial averages of the stochastic wave and heat equation
(University of Kansas, 2021-05-31)In this dissertation, we study some problems related to the convergence in distribution of functionals of Gaussian processes. The approach used to address the problems presented in this thesis is based on Malliavin calculus ...