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Racialization of Foreigners and Self in the Chinese Immigration Project
Get PDFWith the Western invasion and colonization during the 20th Century, China began its internalization of the Western Enlightenment values, leading the country to an identity crisis that paved the way for its race to modernity. Attempting to understand the world and itself, China developed a new racial order largely shaped by the Western discourse and distinctly different from its ancient understanding. Based on 18 semi-structured interviews, this study explores contemporary racialization in China and its application in the racial project of immigration. I found that racial understanding in China is based on a racial/cultural hierarchy. The hierarchical top, Whites/Europeans, represents development and modernity. The hierarchical bottom, Blacks/Africans, symbolize backwardness, poverty, and cultural threats. In radicalizing the foreigners, the Chinese itself is simultaneously racialized by being located in the middle of the hierarchy, in a constant quest to seek validation from the West. Nevertheless, China’s cultural/racial understanding is an unfinished project, shaped by the diverse discourse of natives and subject to the consequence of the social remittance of foreign-socialized individuals
Reflections of Rondo
Get PDFReflections of Rondo is a temporal, visual exploration of the I-94 freeway’s relationship with and implications on the Rondo neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota.
As a prominent center of Black community and culture since the 1900s, Rondo had a thriving, working-class population that built families, businesses, and markers of place and identity in a socially segregated city. They had built “a city within a city” that welcomed people of all backgrounds and classes.
However, with the passing of the Federal Interstate Highway Act in 1956, the state was able to move forward with their plan of building a highway that would tear through the Rondo community, demolishing over 700 family homes and closing over 300 businesses. The Rondo neighborhood was fragmented–disrupting and destroying the social and economic culture that the community spent years and decades fostering.
The story of I-94 and Rondo are one of many across the U.S. where less affluent neighborhoods and neighborhoods of color were subject to “urban revitalization” efforts at their expense. Cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, Boston, and New Orleans are among many that continue to wrestle with the deeply-ridden inequities caused by racist policies and systems.
Drawing on historical records, oral histories, and conversations with community members from Rondo, Reflections of Rondo considers the past, present, and potential futures of the neighborhood. Each artwork is inspired by conversations with community members who spoke of their fondest memories, their vividest experiences, and their most hopeful dreams of what they see Rondo to be.
In highlighting the histories of neighborhoods of color like Rondo, I hope that these artworks create spaces for reflection and conversation about conscious and equitable urban design
Visuomotor Attention Model for General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts
No full textLarge transformers have successfully consolidated diverse tasks by means of prompting, which provides a flexible interface to communicate natural language tasks to a general-purpose model. However, textual instruction alone may not be sufficient or convenient to specify robot manipulation tasks. In many applications, alternative formats like visual goals, few-shot image concepts, and video skill demonstrations have much more expressive power, yet they often require different policy architectures, objective functions, data preprocessing, and training procedures in prior works.
We propose a multimodal prompting framework that casts any robot manipulation command to the same sequence format of interleaving text tokens and visual frames. Thanks to this uniform IO interface, we design a novel transformerbased robot learning architecture, VIMA, that ingests the multimodal task prompts and outputs control commands for a robot arm autoregressively. To systematically evaluate VIMA, we introduce a novel benchmark simulation suite with 17 procedurally-generated tabletop tasks with multimodal prompt templates, 4 levels of generalization protocol, and 600K+ training trajectories. VIMA achieves strong scalability in both model capacity and data size. It outperforms prior SOTA methods in the hardest zero-shot generalization setting by up to 2.9× task success rate given the same training data. With 10× less training data, VIMA still performs 2.7× better than the top competing approach
Tapestries 2022: Message from the Professor
Get PDFProfessor Karín Aguilar-San Juan introduces the 2022 issue of Tapestries with a short essay that addresses the politics of disappointment and draws from freewriting by members of the journal\u27s collective as a way to process the positive and negative feelings of entering Senior Year in a time of continuing global pandemic
Simulating Interactions Between Coronal Mass Ejections
Get PDFCoronal mass ejections (CMEs) launch large amounts of plasma and magnetic fields into the interplanetary medium. Under the right initial conditions, this ejecta can reach Earth and cause issues with electronic devices. As such, we would like to have an accurate model that depicts how these CMEs propagate as they leave the sun. By using fluid dynamics and one-minute resolution in-situ solar wind data, we sought to simulate CME plasma propagation with analytical and numerical models. Because the interstellar medium contains other material and other events happen on the sun simultaneously, CMEs can interact with each other and other ejecta, which can cause them to change, so in order to have an accurate simulation we considered these interactions in our model. For our model, we made the assumption that the plasma was an ideal fluid, was super-alfvenic, and we employed an injection radius of 10 R⦿
Fighting Mortality: Acts of Performance in the Communal Meal and War Scroll
Get PDFSince their initial discovery in the late 1940s, the Dead Sea Scrolls continue to ignite the imaginations of scholars and generate an extensive, and ever growing, amount of scholarship. While scholars have examined different components of both the site of Qumran and the scrolls in reference to purity, it is on the communal meal and the War Scroll that this article focuses. This article proposes a connection between the sectarian communal meal and their eschatology, based not upon previously established similar purity laws, but rather the parallel desire to combat mortality evident in the purity laws of the communal meal and the End of Days narrative in the War Scroll. It is through the lens of performance and the performative that this articles locates the desire to combat mortality in both the communal meal and the War Scroll
Reference Without Acquaintance: Naming and Thought in Fiction and Science
Get PDFMill thought the semantic content of proper names is simply their referents. This is true even for objects we are not acquainted with, even though many contemporary Millian theories appeal to causal connections to account for the reference and thus the meaning of such names. However, in certain contexts, we refer to objects that we are not causally related to — moreover, we seem to be able to think about such objects, as well. Such cases appear in science and fiction, for example, when we talk about hypothetical objects and fictional characters. In this thesis, I will examine the naming practices in fiction and science, and look at how reference is fixed when speakers are not acquainted with the objects they are referring to. I will argue that reference can be fixed in many ways, and due to the close relation between reference and thought, we can think and talk about objects without acquaintance constraints, as long as we participate in the relevant social practices
Je vous donne toute mon âme : Une traduction de l\u27intimité féminine dans Isidora de George Sand
Get PDFMalgré la célébrité de l’écrivaine prolifique George Sand, plusieurs de ses œuvres restent non traduites et inaccessibles aux lecteurs anglophones aujourd’hui. Ce projet examine le livre Isidora, écrit par Sand en 1846, et fournit une traduction partielle du texte. Un essai critique accompagne cette traduction qui explore les raisons de l\u27obscurité de ce texte en comparaison avec d’autres œuvres de Sand, et affirme la pertinence du livre aux lecteurs anglophones du XXIe siècle. Je propose que le cœur de la pertinence et l’excellence d’Isidora réside surtout dans les relations féminines intimes que Sand a créées. La création d’une traduction de ce livre par un angle queer et féministe révèle la longévité de ses thèmes pour des lecteurs modernes, et la singularité du travail de Sand parmi d’autres romans de l’époque