Browsing by Author "Szymanski, Erika, committee member"

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Open Access
A fandom framework: critical digital media literacy in first-year composition curriculum
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Wigginton, Brook, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Szymanski, Erika, committee member; Diffrient, David Scott, committee member
Critical digital media literacy is an important factor in everyday life and in academia, but it has failed to gain momentum in first-year writing studies as a necessary literacy for students to develop. A comparative analysis of two first-year composition programs and the inclusion of autoethnographic examples is done to explore how critical digital media literacy is valued in current curriculum and to showcase its potential. Findings indicate that, while critical digital literacy is, in fact, a major part of first-year composition curriculum, it is not overtly named as such. The power in naming the literacies composition instructors expect students to enact and learn should not be underestimated, and composition scholars must renegotiate how we teach students to navigate our increasingly digitally mediated world. An example of how a fandom framework might name and develop those literacies is offered.
Open Access
Gender dominant interaction design in the Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2025) Lovell, Carrie, author; Amidon, Timothy R., advisor; Szymanski, Erika, committee member; Arthur, Tori, committee member
Interaction Design (IxD) implements rhetorical concerns in the design of digital interfaces, usually used to consider how websites are designed to improve user experience. This thesis applies this concept to the design of interactions in video games, specifically concerning how IxD is engineered to convey gendered experiences. The work with IxD done in this thesis uses Sano-Franchini's concept of Feminist Interaction Design (F-IxD) as a starting point for conceptualizing other ways in which gender impacts IxD and user experience. Specifically, the research question addresses how game design imposes gender and gender ideologies through various interactions and how that impacts player experience through The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (2024). This research was conducted through an exploratory case study, using qualitative coding analysis to identify how the larger community experiences the game within the r/echoesofwisdom subreddit, and using close reading analysis to identify how my positionality impacts my gendered experience through gameplay video capture and field notes. Through this research, it was found that The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom demonstrates shifts in game design that appear to be connected to the implementation of a female protagonist. This thesis (1) problematizes existing research, illustrating that not only is the field viewing gender in video games at a visual surface level, but would also benefit from specific definitions of key terms, such as passive gameplay, and (2) proposes the implementation of Costanza-Chock's existing design justice principles to mitigate existing and future gendered IxD paradigms.
Open Access
Multi-omics investigation of interactions between persistent bacteria and Salmonella in the inflamed gut
(Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Leleiwi, Ikaia, author; Wrighton, Kelly C., advisor; Prenni, Jessica, committee member; Szymanski, Erika, committee member; Weir, Tiffany, committee member
Salmonella is a globally relevant enteric pathogen responsible for numerous outbreaks and debilitating illness yearly. Expansive tropism allows Salmonella to find bastion in zoonotic reservoirs including prominent food animals. Continued prophylactic antibiotic use in livestock and therapeutic antibiotic use in humans has increased selection for multi-drug resistant Salmonella varieties. Most of the current research on Salmonella enteric disease is performed absent complete native gut microbiota. Further, common murine models that could facilitate study of Salmonella in a robust community setting lack model-specific microbiome resources to accomplish the feat. Presented in this dissertation is a comprehensive catalogue of CBA/J mouse gut microbial genomes created as a resource for the research community. The genome database was used to recruit various omics data types to expand the current knowledge of Salmonella infection in a complex community setting, identifying community members robust to inflammation and with potential to further explore as probiotics. In Chapter 1, I review the current state of Salmonella pathogenesis in the context of the gut microbiome. The focus here is to survey the literature for prominent Salmonella mechanisms of infection and how they relate to both host and commensal microbes. I explore host responses to Salmonella and microbial metabolites capable of affecting Salmonella pathogenesis. This microbiome-centric take on Salmonella infection implies a need for comprehensive methods to examine microbes and their processes in vivo, including queries of genes and gene products. A special emphasis on multi-omics approaches is mentioned in this section as powerful tools to holistically study the complete Salmonella-included gut microbiome and to address deficiencies in prior work, ultimately providing more translatable results impacting human health. Chapter 2 outlines the creation of the CBAJ-DB – a first of its kind bacteria and virus genome collection produced from the gut communities of Salmonella infected and uninfected CBA/J mice. Relevance of this work to Salmonella research is explained, emphasizing the CBA/J model advantages to study enteric infection in unperturbed gut communities. Robust genome recovery from deep sequencing yielded over 2,000 bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes including novel bacteria strains and taxa with implications for other mouse breeds and human microbiomes. Viral genomes reconstructed from metagenomic sequencing were linked to bacteria hosts and mined for genes germane to bacteria function. The complete functional potential of the CBA/J gut community in infected and uninfected mice was also explored, detailing a decrease in immune-modulatory functional potential following Salmonella infection, and implying a potentially important role of Alistipes sp. in butyrate production. Importantly, work from this chapter provides the infrastructure for genome-resolved multi-omics investigations detailed in Chapter 3 that are critical to determine functional links between Salmonella and the commensal microbiota. In Chapter 3 additional metagenomic sequencing is combined with the CBAJ-DB and used to recruit metatranscriptomic and metabolomic data from infected and uninfected CBA/J mice. We reveal expression and metabolites that implicate numerous commensal bacteria with the flow of sulfur in the inflamed intestine, making it available for host oxidation to tetrathionate in support of Salmonella anaerobic respiration. Current dogma surrounding Salmonella lactate utilization from the host is also confronted by our data, which implies potential cross feeding on microbially derived D-lactate by Salmonella during peak infection. These expression data are supported by random forest and logistic regression modeling which determined genes for D-lactate production or utilization are important to Salmonella-association of other bacteria in the inflamed gut. Relatively abundant bacteria observed in Chapter 2 were confirmed to be active in infected communities and to be expressing genes relevant to Salmonella processes like chitinase, lactate dehydrogenase, and sulfatase. Not only does this chapter illustrate the utility of the CBAJ-DB but it highlights how multi-omics investigation in complete ecosystems can unveil results that may be different than claims made based on in vitro or reduced community in vivo studies. The final chapter presented here summarizes the key findings from Chapters 2 and 3 and offers avenues for future research including specific strain isolation from infected communities and subsequent Salmonella competition experiments to determine probiotic therapeutic potential. This dissertation aims to (1) Examine the diversity of the CBA/J mouse gut and provide a genomic resource to the microbiome community, (2) using various omics techniques, discover interactions between Salmonella and commensal bacteria that could impact pathogenesis, and (3) identify members of the inflamed community with probiotic potential that are indifferent to Salmonella or that display niche overlap for substrate competition with Salmonella. Ultimately, this dissertation provides a comprehensive examination of Salmonella infection amidst a whole and robust microbiome identifying important membership in the inflamed community and linking autochthonous processes with pathogenic ones to better understand Salmonella enteric disease.