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Property Value(s): Race, Class, And Political Economy In Narratives Of The Single-Family House And Lot
No full textThis dissertation establishes the single-family house and lot as a political economy of its own. This project maps a political economy of race and class by focusing on both literary representations of the single-family house and lot and this space and structure’s historical, geographical, and architectural significance in and around the city of Detroit. Focusing on Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920) and Babbitt (1922), John Updike’s Rabbit Redux (1971), Amy Haimerl’s Detroit Hustle: A Memoir of Love, Life & Home (2016), and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House (2015) this analysis illuminates the values that underly and permeate this space and structure and shape the social and political discourses by which it is penetrated, mediated, and determined. By doing so, this project maps a kind of genealogy of epistemologies of the home (Mezel and Briganti 837), beginning with the ways that men like Henry Ford and William J. Levitt worked to mold this space and structure into a sine qua non of American middle-class identity for working-class whites. Proceeding from the conception and spread of the modern institution of homeownership in the early twentieth century, and leading up to a pivotal point in the 1970s when the cracks began to show in the promise that was supposed to have been built into this institution for working-class whites, I illustrate how these cracks appeared along lines of class and race. By then focusing on divergent experiences of homeownership of lifelong Detroiters and “New Detroiters” in the “rebirth” narrative of Detroit in our current century, this historical trajectory sheds light on the easily missed historical connections between working-class whites who fought black encroachment in their white neighborhoods in the city earlier and a new generation of privileged white newcomers and gentrifiers moving to Detroit to be part of its touted “rebirth.” This history ultimately frames my concluding picture of the dispossession and displacement experienced by many of Detroit’s lifelong black residents, which I argue is built into this process of “rebirth,” and the importance of the right to return home
Unstable Rivalry: Structure, Domestic Politics, And Taiwan In U.s.-China Relations
No full textInternational relations (IR) scholarship frequently utilizes structural and domestic political levels of analysis to explain interstate war and conflict. While U.S.-China relations have deteriorated significantly, there is considerable disagreement about what caused this change. In this dissertation I utilize Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) to operationalize instability between the U.S. and China and test competing theories. Increasing levels of MIDs since 2009 broadly confirm structural theories that hold power parity is a primary driver of conflict between great powers. Case studies of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis (1995 – 1996) and Fourth Taiwan Strait Crisis (2022), however, illustrate that domestic political factors also play an important causal role. This holds important implications for the advantages and limitations of parsimonious structural theories and the possible causes and likelihood of future war between the U.S. and China. An examination of the logic of nuclear weaponry and China’s own nuclear buildup illustrates the continued salience of these findings in the nuclear era
Advancing Generative Ai In 3d And 4d Spaces
No full textGenerative Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed how we synthesize, edit, and manipulate complex data, opening new possibilities for immersive digital content. This dissertation, titled “Advancing Generative AI in 3D and 4D Spaces,” investigates the capabilities and limitations of state-of-the-art generative models in static 3D scenes and time-aware 4D environments. In the 3D setting, scene editing is hindered by multi-view inconsistency and the high computational cost of per-scene retraining. To address these issues, the work introduces Free-Editor, a training free approach that utilizes an Edit Transformer to propagate a single edited view across all camera perspectives without additional optimisation, delivering prompt faithful edits up to twenty times faster than contemporary baselines while preserving geometric fidelity. Extending into the 4D domain, the dissertation confronts the added complexity of temporal coherence. A new framework, PSF-4D, adapts diffusion-based generation to dynamic scenes through progressive, correlated noise sampling that couples spatial and temporal information, enabling coherent local edits, style transfers, and object removals throughout video-volumes. Together, these contributions push generative AI beyond static content creation toward real-time, spatiotemporally consistent scene manipulation, with broad implications for virtual production, robotics simulation, and immersive analytics
Restricted Delaunay-Based Anisotropic Meshing With Riemannian Metrics
No full text\centerline{\bf RESTRICTED DELAUNAY-BASED ANISOTROPIC MESHING WITH RIEMANNIAN METRICS}
{\setlength\baselineskip{0.3in} \begin{center} by\\ \medskip {\bf Sikai Zhong}\\ \medskip {\bf August 2025}\\ \end{center} \Vspc \begin{tabular}{ll} {\bf Advisor:} & Dr. Zichun Zhong \\ {\bf Major:} & Computer Science \\ {\bf Degree:} Doctor of philosophy \end{tabular} }
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Nowadays, 3D scanners, such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), have become more affordable and accessible. Capturing high-resolution 3D data is easier than ever before, point clouds, thus, have becomes instrumental in emerging technologies such as 3D manufacturing, animations, autonomous driving and virtual reality (VR), etc. Large-scale and high-resolution raw point clouds are required to represent complicated 3D objects with a lot of features and details. Therefore, it is important to resample the original dense point clouds into the relative sparse point sets with high-quality and high-fidelity. Point clouds lack explicit connection information, which is necessary in many tasks, such as finite element method (FEM) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). 3D reconstruction is thus required to generate the meshes. Resampling and reconstruction together are commonly referred as remeshing. How to robustly and effectively represent 3D objects with high-fidelity is a challenging research problem. There are mainly three categories regarding remeshing techniques, Centroidal Voronoi diagram (CVT) based methods, particle based methods and geometric embedding based methods. Among these techniques, particle based methods are GPU friendly and easy to implement since it is essentially structurally-aware and physically-aware. Capturing the complicated boundary / surface of 3D objects typically needs intensive linear simplices even with an appropriate anisotropy (defined as Riemannian tensor field). High order surface representations, such as B-spline, implicit functions, and subdivision surfaces, can further reduce the required number of elements. All the existing curved meshing techniques do not essentially consider the Riemannian metrics in arbitrary 3D shape volumes. In short, they are not specifically designed for Riemannian mesh elements followed by the definition of the Riemannian metric field, so that theoretically they could not guarantee a high accuracy and fidelity on both geometric boundary and physical metric simultaneously, which also leads to ``over-smooth\u27\u27 issue. Riemannian Delaunay Tetrahedralization is a better solution when fidelity is the main concern.
In this thesis, we propose an efficient method that constructs high-quality isotropic / anisotropic hexagonal / quadrilateral resampling results from point clouds. It should be noted that our unified framework can easily be modified and applied to surface / volume meshes. We also propose a practical algorithm to compute curved Riemannian restricted Delaunay tetrahedralization to keep both the geometry and the metric.
The main contributions presented in this thesis are listed below.
\begin{itemize} \item \textit{Unified Straight Restricted Delaunay Triangulation:} We introduce a new unified particle-based formulation for resampling with specific patterns from original point clouds. Given the input point clouds, the proposed -Gaussian kernel function is defined to simulate the inter-particle energy and force to form the isotropic / adaptive / anisotropic hexagonal and quadrilateral sampling patterns. Then, the particle-based optimization can be easily formulated and computed in parallel scheme with the high-efficiency and the fast convergence, without any control of particle population. Finally, based on the optimized particle distribution, the high-quality surface meshes are reconstructed by computing the restricted Voronoi diagram and its dual mesh with the parallel implementation. The experimental results are demonstrated by using extensive examples and evaluation criteria as well as compared with the state-of-the-art in the point cloud resampling and reconstruction. \item \textit{ Curved Riemannian Restricted Delaunay Tetrahedralization:} We present a new method to compute the high-quality curved anisotropic restricted Delaunay tetrahedralizations (CARDT) for given volumetric shapes endowed with arbitrary Riemannian metric tensor fields. The main idea is to firstly develop an effective meshing technique to generate inversion-avoiding straight-edge coarse anisotropic tetrahedral mesh by computing the isotropic 3-simplices (tetrahedrons) in a high-dimensional (high-d) Euclidean embedding space, where it can retain both the geometric and metric properties from the input Riemannian manifold. After that, we design a simplex-based pointwise optimization strategy to compute the straight simplices into curved simplices in the high-d space to further preserve the Riemannian metrics (geodesics in volume) as well as avoid inversions. We demonstrate that our method is practically useful for generating complicated 3D curved anisotropic volume meshes to well preserve the Riemannian metric fields by evaluating a variety of challenging 3D Riemannian metric tensor fields and real applications in numerical cosmology and geology. Experimental results are compared with the state-of-the-art in anisotropic and curved tetrahedral meshing. \end{itemize
The 1973 Detroit Teachers\u27 Strike and Its Long-Term Effects on Labor Negotiations
No full textThis paper examines the efforts made by Detroit educators in 1973 to secure better wages and smaller class sizes as well as Board of Education decision-making processes in response to budget cuts imposed by the city. Further, this research traces concurrent socio-economic issues that were morphing into political issues, helping define not only the labor struggles of teachers but also reflecting struggles felt by citizens in Detroit and other U.S. industrial cities. This study aims to contribute to research on how local budgets and federal policy have impacted and continue to impact public education nationwide to the present day
Parental Attitudes About Children’s Gender Nonconformity Books
No full textThis study examined parental attitudes about gender nonconformity in children’s books in a sample of parents with children ages 4 to 11. This research sought to understand parental demographic identities associated with attitudes regarding children’s books about gender nonconformity, as well as conversations with children about gender nonconformity more broadly. Participants were asked to assess their attitudes toward each of a series of books that either did or did not discuss gender-nonconforming children. Specifically, they were asked about their child reading each book, children in general reading each book, having each book in their child’s library, and having their child’s teacher teach the book in the classroom. Overall, parents had more negative attitudes toward books about gender nonconformity than about control books that were not about gender. Parents also had the most negative attitudes about teaching books about gender in the classroom. Associations were found between parental attitudes toward gender nonconformity and political affiliation and ideology, religiosity, and age of parent. Republican-identifying parents and those who had more conservative political ideologies reported more negative attitudes toward gender nonconformity books, as well as more negative attitudes about exposing children to gender nonconformity overall. Parents who rated themselves as committed to religious teachings and those who noted that they were more religious also had more negative gender nonconformity book attitudes and overall gender attitudes, although these effects did not hold when controlling for political ideology. Older parents also had more negative gender nonconformity book attitudes and overall gender attitudes. The findings of this study may have implications for educating parents about the impact of gender nonconformity books
Self-Event Connections, Good Storytelling, and the Good Life: Evidence of Cultural Norms and Individual Differences in Young Adults’ Narratives of Life Challenges
No full textThe way people connect their life stories and sense of self is important for identity and functioning. U.S. emerging adults’ expressions of self-event connections within a story may reflect societal narrative conventions and indicate the narrative work required to integrate redemption into one’s identity. We recruited 336 college and community adults (Mage = 20.53 years; 57.7% women), who provided a challenging event narrative and reported well-being. Instances of self-event connections were coded for valence (i.e., negative, neutral, positive) and category (i.e., disposition, value, growth). We expected individuals’ expressions of connections to follow a redemptive arc and transition from dispositional/value to growth connections as narratives resolved. We expected individuals who expressed more (a) positive and (b) growth-focused connections to report greater well-being. Findings supported most expectations. Connections shifted toward positive valence but moved through growth toward dispositions and values. Greater uses of positive and growth-focused connections were robustly associated with greater well-being endorsements
From Stigma to Shared Suffering: Tracing Transformation in Online Representations of Illness During Coronavirus
No full textThis research investigates a particular metaphor used in the pandemic narrative in China, the character yáng 羊 (sheep or goat), phonetically similar to yáng 阳 (positive), evolving into a narrative tool for those who tested positive for the virus. Drawing from Sontag’s framework of illness metaphors, it examines the “sheep” metaphor collected from social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu, Twitter (X), and WeChat via discourse analysis. The research explores the narrative dynamics from an initial descriptor to a more complex narrative symbol to shed light on how the Chinese have coped with the pandemic
The Translation of Transgressive Interiority: Rooting Catherine Breillat’s Barbe bleue in the Word-Image Dynamics of Early Illustrations
No full textFrom the first appearance of the illustrations of Simon Fokke and Jacques de Sève in the 1742 Coustellier edition, to, significantly, the unsigned ink drawing of the 1797 Devaux edition, there emerges striking depictions of an interiority hinted at but ultimately unarticulated in Charles Perrault’s tale “La Barbe bleue.” This article examines how the representation of complex intimacy found in contemporary, visually rich, adaptations of the Bluebeard narrative—specifically Catherine Breillat’s film Barbe bleue—originates in reading the illustrations of these eighteenth-century French illustrated editions against the subtleties of Perrault’s textual choices