Leah McKown\u27s Portfolio

Collective-Historical Trauma: A Portfolio of Basic Theory and Case Studies Collective-historical trauma is a fairly new concept within academia. Despite this novelty, the theory underwrites many historical events and can serve as an explanatory factor in describing some of our most potent social issues. At its core, collective-historical trauma refers to the damage incurred by a population when a trauma occurs, whether it is acute or systemic. This topic is particularly potent right now as we attempt to tackle COVID-19, police brutality, and racism in America. This collection addresses the edges of collective-historical trauma by providing a brief, introductory overview and including several case studies in which the theory is central and thematic. The collection includes the following pieces: Critical and Collective Psychologies, Presentation This presentation was created and given as a Teaching Assistant for Introduction to Psychology as a Human Science. The aim of this piece is to provide a theoretical outline of the subject. Creating Justice Psychology, Paper This paper was written during my time as a student in Introduction to Psychology as a Human Science. The piece advocates for the development of a psychology which addresses social justice issues. Generational Portraits: A Comparative Study of the Baby Boomer and Millennial Age Cohorts, Poster This poster was presented at the Undergraduate Research and Scholarship Symposium. The piece analyzes the experiences of two generations, “Baby Boomers” and “Millennials”. The formative events of the respective generations are addressed, which contribute to understanding collective and historical trauma. Shell Shock and the Medical Community: Messages and Implications, Paper This paper was authored for Writing History. The piece addresses “shell shock”, the medical community, and the First World War. Seeing that World War I is an excellent case study in collective psychology and trauma, its inclusion enhances the collection. Terrorism and Human Rights, Paper This paper was written for History of Human Rights. The goal of this piece is to conceptualize terrorism as an issue of human rights. The primary case study of the paper is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has implications for understanding collective trauma.https://dsc.duq.edu/portfolios/1014/thumbnail.jp

Exploring Academic Opportunities for Military-Connected Students: A Systems Theory Approach

Military-connected children experience frequent disruptions to their daily lives as a result of military lifestyle demands like frequent relocations and service-related separations from their service member parent. These disruptions impact all areas of their lives including their homes and schools. While the body of research concerning military-connected children’s experiences at school has grown over recent decades, little is known about specific individual and contextual factors that may serve as assets or constraints. Knowing more about specific factors that influence school experiences for military-connected youth is a critical step in promoting and scaling home- and school-based interventions. This three-paper dissertation begins by situating extant literature into Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory framework to provide a model for conceptualizing the numerous factors directly and indirectly influencing the school experiences of military-connected students. Next, it explores patterns in individual survey responses from military-connected parents to identify relationships between demographic variables, military lifestyle demands, and parent-school satisfaction. Finally, the dissertation uses a positive youth development framework to examine the school experiences of military-connected teens through focus group discussions with teens, their parents, and their teachers. Taken together, these pieces help to provide a cohesive framework and updated foundation for understanding the school experiences of military-connected children. The results of this dissertation highlight the strengths of military-connected students and families and the immense opportunities all stakeholders have to support them and address their evolving needs. The findings for all three papers provide necessary insight for understanding the military-connected student’s experience and intentionally leveraging new and existing resources to meet their needs

Geographic Indicators: Unexpected Fodder in Brexit Negotiations

The future of intellectual property, especially geographical indications, in the UK is increasingly murky. Libby McKown explores what will happen if GIs are used in the fray of hard negotiations about Brexit.https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lawjournalonline/1003/thumbnail.jp

Using Digital Commons to Highlight a Digital Collection: The Adventures of Sophie

This poster will detail the experience of migrating the Sophie Digital Collection of Literary Works by German-Speaking Women from a website into an interactive site on Digital Commons by the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University. The Sophie Project is named for Sophie von LaRoche and includes poetry, fiction, drama and film, song and music composition, essays, nonfiction writings and biographies all in native German language. It will highlight the structure built within Digital Commons to exhibit the richness of the content in the Sophie Collection and the interactive linking within the metadata fields

Short & Long-Term Restoration Dynamics of Created Freshwater and Estuarine Wetlands

The restoration of tidal and freshwater wetlands either through compensatory mitigationor voluntary efforts have become a major strategy to conserve remaining wetland resources after historic losses and in the face of current unprecedented threats. Prior efforts of wetland restoration have often fallen short of expectations due to the reliance of a compliance success framework, which requires short monitoring timeframes, misapplies successional theories, and defines success of projects into a yes or no dichotomy. Decades of advancement in restoration ecology theory and its application to wetland ecology and botany have led to the development of a functional success framework to improve outcomes in wetland restoration. Functional success is a framework of thinking in restoration ecology that includes concepts of resiliency and alternative stable-state theory, long-term monitoring requirements, adaptive management, and a view of success as a progression. Elements of functional success were applied to two unique wetland creation studies to improve the understanding of restoration trajectories and baseline expectations for possible outcomes and adaptive management needs. New Hampshire has adopted a policy for erosion control that establishes living shorelines as the preferred shoreline stabilization method over the past five years. Despite widespread use ii on the mid-Atlantic and Southeastern coast in the United States, living shoreline performance has not been well-documented in New England, where shorter growing seasons and ice rafting pose unique challenges that increase with latitude. The vegetation, nekton, and biogeochemical processes were monitored for two years at three living shoreline projects and compared to both references and no-action shorelines to gauge recovery. The recovery of the system was assessed with the Restoration Performance Index and restoration trajectories of the Restoration Performance Index scores and individual metrics were assessed over project age. Living shorelines recovered over 50% of ecosystem structure, function, and services within four years post-constructions. The restoration trajectory followed a logistic regression indicating two phases of recovery: an initial rapid phase driven by nekton and vegetation and a slower, more incremental phase driven by biogeochemical processes. Adaptive management of living shorelines were documented and included wrack removal, measures to prevent herbivory, and replanting of vegetation. Wetland ecology and restoration historically developed successional models of the vegetation community by studying wetlands of various ages simultaneously. The experimental approach has been cheap, quick, and effective at understanding broad floristic trends, allowing for practitioners to set expectations including the widely held notion that the vegetation community reaches a dynamic equilibrium after 15 years. A created freshwater wetland in Portsmouth, New Hampshire was floristically reevaluated in 2020 to add to a thirty-five-year data set of the species composition and community distribution of the vegetation community. The wetland followed similar documented patterns of being dominated by hydrophytes, perennials, and natives over time. Species turnover, the rate of succession, declined by half between the 7 – 18 and 18 – 35 years post-construction. Conversely, the distribution of wetland communities experienced drastic change after 18 years post-construction with double the number of wetland communities, major cattail expansion into graminoid meadows and aquatic beds, proliferation of woody vegetation, and development of unique vegetation communities like sedge meadow marshes and red maple swamps