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Feminist Pedagogy in STEM: The Intersection of STEM Pedagogy and Feminist Theory
Get PDFScience, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education aims to cultivate the capacity for innovation and real-world problem-solving (Marrero et al., 2014). However, STEM pedagogy has not historically aligned with this goal, often failing to teach students the necessary skills and mindset for creative problem-solving (Stehle & Peters-Burton, 2019). Traditional STEM pedagogical methods, such as rote and lecture-based learning, are based on the teacher being the dominant source of knowledge and students being the passive receivers (Achuonye, 2015; Khalaf & Mohammed Zin, 2018). These methods lack student support, collaboration, active learning, and real-world contexts (Gasiewski et al., 2012). Furthermore, the exclusion of cultures, identities, and historical connections about how we come to know scientific facts breed inequities often at the expense of innovation (Graves Jr et al., 2022)
Work Will Not Save Us: An Asian American Crip Manifesto
No full textDrawing together disability justice, Asian American studies, and feminist/ queer-of-color labor analysis, this collaboratively authored essay forwards an anti-work manifesto shaped by our lived experiences as sick, disabled and queer Asian American scholars laboring in the academic-industrial complex. This essay offers a two-part intervention: first, it aims to expand nascent conversations on disability politics and its relationship to racial capitalism, and second, it puts forth a critique of the Asian American emphasis on achievement as an instrument of belonging and potential inoculation against racialized violence. It also unfolds in two parts: first, a section on why we refuse work, and second, a section on how to perform this refusal.
As we come to this essay from our respective positionalities in contingent, tenure-stream, and tenured academic loci, as well as from our shared investments in feminist and queer frameworks, the first section mobilizes feminist and queer disability analysis to interrogate the fraught investments in work shared across Asian American and Disability Studies, addressing the complexities of gendered, contingent, care, and service work within the academic landscape (and particularly as we have experienced them). The second section offers a survival guide for navigating the labor demands placed on racialized, queer, and/ or disabled scholars, channeling Asian American rage to move beyond saying no and toward saying fuck off
Mathematics Underlying Cryptographic Protocols with Application to Blockchain
No full textThis thesis is an exploration of the mathematical concepts employed in modern encryption schemes, with a focus on their use in blockchain technologies. The goal is to provide an introduction to the operation of blockchain and to use it as a frame for investigating common information security algorithms in use today and the underlying hard math problems that make them possible. The algorithms discussed include the Secure Hash Algorithm family, the Digital Signature Algorithm, and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm. This paper examines the underlying mathematical problems employed by each of these algorithms, which include the discrete logarithm problem, the problem of finding eth roots modulo N, factoring large numbers, and the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem, and their relative complexity to demonstrate their ability to provide information security
Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949
No full textAn intimate look at the 1949 Asian Women’s Conference, the movements it drew from, and its influence on feminist anticolonialism around the world.
In 1949, revolutionary activists from Asia hosted a conference in Beijing that gathered together their comrades from around the world. The Asian Women’s Conference developed a new political strategy, demanding that women from occupying colonial nations contest imperialism with the same dedication as women whose countries were occupied. Bury the Corpse of Colonialism shows how activists and movements create a revolutionary theory over time and through struggle—in this case, by launching a strategy for anti-imperialist feminist internationalism.
At the heart of this book are two stories. The first describes how the 1949 conference came to be, how it was experienced, and what it produced. The second follows the delegates home. What movements did they represent? Whose voices did they carry? How did their struggles hone their praxis? By examining the lives of more than a dozen AWC participants, Bury the Corpse of Colonialism traces the vital differences at the heart of internationalist solidarity for women’s emancipation in a world structured through militarism, capitalism, patriarchy, and the seeming impossibility of justice.
Source: Publisherhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/swg_books/1010/thumbnail.jp
The Letters of Libanius from the Age of Theodosius
No full textLibanius of Antioch (AD 314-93), teacher, rhetorician and eloquent exponent of Greek paideia, was one of the most prolific letter writers of late antiquity with more than 1500 surviving letters from an even greater total. This volume contains the first English-language translation of all the letters written between 388 and 393, which provide insights both into his professional and personal circumstances and the changes taking place in the political, religious and social environment of the late fourth century. The letters while fulfilling many of the usual functions of late antique correspondence as vehicles in creating or maintaining friendship networks, promoting relationships with men in power, supporting rhetoric and Hellenic learning and seeking favours for friends, students and proteges, also reveal Libanius\u27 reaction to his circumstances at the end of his life - his waning influence as a teacher, the hostility directed towards him by factions in Antioch and in Constantinople, the loss of friends and loved ones, in particular his son, and his ill health and impending mortality. Source: Publisherhttps://scholarworks.smith.edu/cls_books/1000/thumbnail.jp
Generic interpretations of Possessive Recursion in English-Speaking Children
Get PDFTwo-part s-possessives such as the dad’s kid’s bike admit at least two distinct interpretations: the dad has a kid who has a bike, or the dad has a bike that is made for kids. We propose that the former interpretation derives from recursively embedding DP-possessives, whereas the latter derives from representing kid’s bike asa generic NP-possessive. Accordingly, in the right context, two-part s-possessives are fully ambiguous for adults between ‘recursive’ and ‘generic’ readings. These readings can be disambiguated syntactically. Consider the difference in meaning when we insert a relative clause and extract the constituent kid’s bike—the kid’s bike that is the dad’s—versus when we extract the head noun bike—the bike that is the dad’s kid’s. Our story-based experiment demonstrates that 4-7-year-olds (N=79) and adults (N=68) strongly favor (~80%) the generic interpretation of phrases like the kid’s bike that is the dad’s, as the A-over-A constraint blocks the extraction of a DP-possessive out of a recursive DP.1 Similarly, adults show a strong preference (~80%) for recursive interpretations of phrases like the bike that is the dad’s kid’s, as the A-over-A constraint blocks the extraction of the head noun bike out of the generic NP-possessive kid’s bike. However, 4-5-year-olds admit generic readings of these recursive phrases 54% of the time; it is not until 6 or 7 years that children show an adult-like preference for the recursive interpretation (~80%). These data support two complementary claims. First, that recursive possessives are acquired late on account of their syntax, and second that children, like adults, represent generic possessives under a different syntactic node than regular possessives. Not all languages permit recursive prenominal possessives, and there is variation in the node (NP, DP, POSS, K)hosting the phrase. As a result, young children faced with two-part s-possessives may default to generic interpretations, which involve universal NP modification, until they recognize possessive recursion is a part of their grammar
Investigating Weyl Semimetal and Magnetized Phases in Quantum Materials Using Stochastic and Machine Learning Methods
No full textPyrochlore iridates are a class of materials that experience a metal to insulator phase transition in response to temperature or pressure. These materials are of particular interest due to their applications for superconductivity and other areas of physics. This thesis investigates methods of modeling and identifying phase transitions. The statistical nature of phase transitions lends itself well to computational study, however there are limitations such as the sign problem. Due to the complexity of pyrochlore iridates, the Ising model was first created using Monte Carlo methods to explore simple phase transitions dependent on temperature. To categorize these phase transitions, this project used two types of machine learning: supervised and unsupervised. The methods for creating the Ising model were applied to a toy model for pyrochlore iridates. With this toy model, the feasibility of using neural networks to identify phases, which specific focus on the Weyl semimetal phase, for pyrochlore iridates was tested
