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Reclaiming the Right to Knowledge and Knowledge Sovereignty: Participatory Action Research and Police Violence in the Deaf Community
Get PDFIn recent years, people in the United States have been expressing increasing concernsover police officer’s use of force against citizens. Perhaps even more concerning is the increasing number of d/Deaf people being injured or killed by police, which has raised further concern over whether police are trained to work with d/Deaf people. This dissertation delves into the complex issue through engaging in a decolonial participatory action research (DPAR) journey that explores, analyzes, and creates room for the understanding of police brutality in the Deaf community and offers ways in which Deaf community members create ways to confront and disrupt police violence against Deaf people in Virginia. In other ways, this dissertation is a personal and collaborative reflection of the process and importance of engaging DPAR in an academic setting where independent research is often the standard. But in its totality, it is more than a project confronting police violence in Deaf communities and an exploration that supports the importance of the use of PAR in academia. It is a call to action for researchers, academics, practitioners, and communities to create forms of inquiry that are grounded dialogue and action that seek to heal and restore
SCHOOL NURSES MOVING THE NEEDLE ON HPV CANCER DISPARITIES: INTEGRATING QUALITATIVE & QUANTITATIVE METHODS TO IMPROVE ON-TIME HPV VACCINE COMPLIANCE
Get PDFThe human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine has the potential to prevent cancer. Unfortunately, many people remain unprotected against the common viral infection that can lead to several types of cancer. The HPV vaccine is most effective when given before exposure and is recommended for adolescents between the ages of 11 and 12. Uptake has been sub-optimal, when compared to other recommended adolescent vaccines like tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, and meningitis. School nurses are involved in immunization compliance activities and play a pivotal role in preventative care for adolescents, including improving HPV vaccination. The primary objective of this dissertation is to mitigate HPV-related cancers by examining the socioecological factors influencing school nursing practices concerning vaccine compliance. To meet this goal 3 related studies were conducted. First, a systematic literature review (SLR) was conducted to thematically analyze all relevant findings reported in scholarly publications that include school nurses 'experiences and roles in promoting and administering the HPV vaccine in school settings guided by the socioecological framework. Second, a quantitative analysis identified social determinants of school-level HPV vaccination rates in Virginia including county-level factors like urbanicity, majority racial/ethnic group, and political leaning and school-level factors like percentage of students that are economically disadvantaged, majority racial/ethnic group, and percentage of children with disabilities. Finally, semi-structured interviews were conducted with school nurses in Virginia to understand their experiences with HPV vaccine promotion. The socioecological model was used to frame the studies and to guide the analysis of the data. This 5-level model included intrapersonal, interpersonal, organizational, community, and societal/policy was used. Factors that impact school nursing practice related to HPV vaccine promotion are present at each level of the socioecological model. At the intrapersonal level school nurses had good vaccine knowledge and positive attitudes towards vaccines, however, there were concerns related to vaccine safety and necessity. At the interpersonal level, school nurses sought to balance HPV vaccine promotion while maintaining positive relationships with students and families. Organizational factors like poor workflow processes and competing demands negatively impacted nursing practice. At the community level, school nurses relied on community partners to facilitate vaccination for families. Health departments and medical clinics were the most cited community partners, and school nurses relied on the partners to educate families and bundle vaccines. At the societal level, stigma was found to impact HPV vaccine uptake. Policies that normalize the vaccine as part of the general childhood vaccine schedule and large-scale education campaigns were noted. Interventions to improve nursing practice at the intrapersonal level should focus on the safety and efficacy of the HPV vaccine. Improvement in interpersonal communication skills will empower school nurses to positively engage with students and families. Schools can facilitate nursing vaccine practice with workflow improvements like adopting integrative vaccine reporting systems and supporting school-based vaccine champions. Accessible family-centered vaccine events and strong community partnerships allow school nurses to connect families with vaccines. Policy advocacy should continue to normalize the HPV vaccine as part of routine childhood vaccination
Estimating Rare and Out-of-Vocabulary Word Representations in NLP Models
Get PDFLanguage representation is a fundamental part of modern Natural Language Processing (NLP). Almost all NLP tasks involve building a representation of the text in question and applying operations to those representations. Representations at the word level have been a large focus in capturing meaning in text, both in a static sense (the word meaning by itself) and a contextualized sense (the word as it fits in its context). However, while word representations have been particularly effective in solving NLP problems, they suffer from a major weakness; they struggle with rare and out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. Static word embeddings only have embeddings for words that existed in its original training corpus. Contextualized embeddings theoretically can handle previously unseen words, but have been shown to still struggle with them. As such, in an effort to address this blindspot, I investigate and propose multiple methods of addressing this issue. I focus on strategies similar to how humans deal with unknown words they encounter; using the word roots and context to guess the meaning. I propose several strategies that incorporate these aspects in order to arrive at a strong estimate for rare and OOV words, in order to increase the understanding on NLP models. I propose Estimator Vectors, a model that trains new word embeddings along with other representations, with the goal of estimating new words on the spot. I then discuss our proposed model SubAtt, a deep attention based architecture with the goal of estimating new embeddings for rare and OOV words for existing embeddings, and SPRUCE, a similar approach adapted to contextualized models. I then investigate the rare word problem in modern Large Language Models, demonstrating that the problem not only still exists in these models, but has potential more negative impact, due to the rise in prompting and zero-shot strategies
Friends of Slavery: Barbadian Quakers and the Spiritual Plantation Family, 1656-1719
Get PDFThis dissertation examines the relationship between Quakers and slavery through familial structures in the seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Atlantic. When Friends Ann Austin and Mary Fisher introduced Quakerism to Barbados in 1655, the development of the Society of Friends coincided and intersected with the development of slave societies in the Caribbean; Barbadian Friends did not challenge established norms of a slave society with their religious practices, but rather contributed to the creation of a slave society as they created their religious society. As Quakerism rapidly spread throughout the Atlantic, one foundational framework persisted: the family. By investigating how family structures were proposed, viewed, and practiced, this project expands the narrative that Quakers were involved in slavery to understand how they were involved in slavery. Printed tracts, letters, meeting minutes, court records, government papers, censuses, maps, and archaeological findings provide insight into how Quakers on Barbados constructed a proto-paternalistic practice of the faith to include and impose upon enslaved familial structures, subsuming them under white familial and spiritual authority. I propose that three types of family structures existed upon a Quaker plantation – the enslaver’s family and their spiritual kin; enslaved Black families, both of biological and fictive kinship; and the overarching theological family which included white Friends, servants, and enslaved individuals. This became the spiritual plantation family, intrinsically linking slavery and familial salvation. I examine how these familial structures existed individually and interacted with each other within the framework of Quakerism to posit how a Quaker plantation theologically operated in the Caribbean and was then transplanted to Carolina and Pennsylvania. With the colonization of Carolina, the spiritual plantation family system became the legacy of Barbadian Quakers in North America; and when Friends transplanted their spiritual families to Pennsylvania, they taught the system to other Quaker migrants. Friends who served in their Meeting and on the colonial Assemblies felt that Quakerism and slavery were so intertwined within the family that any disruption to the slave trade risked the salvation of Friends in the entire colony, and therefore avoided antislavery notions. Quaker abolitionism was not inevitable. By expanding geographical bounds and implementing a family history lens, this dissertation provides a new understanding of the history of Quakers and slavery
Passing Out in the Open: An Examination of Gay Identity and Communication Strategies in Relational Contexts
Get PDFThis dissertation explores the phenomenon of passing as straight among gay and bisexual men within the context of Co-Cultural Theory and the Communication Theory of Identity. By analyzing the communication strategies employed by gay and bisexual men to navigate interactions with the dominant heterosexual culture, this research investigates the factors influencing the decision to pass, the contexts in which passing occurs, and the perceived costs and rewards associated with passing. Through a mixed- methods research approach, this study illuminates how gay and bisexual men manage their identities in heteronormative environments, the challenges they face, and the implications for their mental health and sense of self. The qualitative portion of the dissertation (n=8) found that passing as a communication strategy does not exist in isolation, nor is it an “all or nothing” decision. Rather, gay and bisexual men choose to pass due to a confluence of situational factors and contexts that can change daily, even moment to moment. In addition, the quantitative data (n=246) found that the level at which a gay or bisexual man is out to the people in his social network will have a significant impact on the communication strategies and approaches they will. employ. More specifically, those men who were more “out” with their social networks were also more likely to use more assertive communication strategies, a finding in line with the expectations of Co-Cultural Communication Theory. Additionally, the quantitative survey also examined the relationship between one’s level of outness and the presence of “gaps” in the communication of identity, finding that those who were more out also expressed smaller gaps between their communication of personal, social, and enacted identities These findings were again in line with the expectations of existing theory, in particular the Communication Theory of Identity. By examining the intersections of sexuality, gender, power dynamics, and communication styles, this research contributes to queer theory scholarship, particularly by bringing communication theory and research into a domain that historically emerged from critical theory, cultural studies, women’s studies, and sociology. Perhaps most importantly of all, this dissertation provides valuable insights into the lived experiences of LGBTQ+ individuals who must navigate, even deep into the 21st century, an alienating heteronormative social context
Beyond a Land Acknowledgement: Taking a First Step Towards Reparative Action
Get PDFThe Logistics Committee of the Conference on Academic Library Management (CALM)’s 2023 conference posed a question early on in conference planning: what if we rejected the traditional model of land acknowledgements? In answering that question, the committee embarked on a year-long process to radically revise the statement to one focused on reparative action. This article covers the revision process, including what inspired it and how the committee structured their work
Three Essays on Dynamic Mechanism Design
Get PDFThe dissertation focuses on exploring theory and experiments in dynamic mechanism design, aiming to provide helpful guidance for dynamic mechanism design in natural environments. The first chapter, co-authored with Daniel Houser, compares the experimental revenue of the “optimal non-clairvoyant dynamic mechanism” with its theoretical prediction, thereby emphasizing the practical value of this novel mechanism. Dynamic mechanisms provide a powerful means for optimizing the revenue and efficiency of repeated auctions. However, implementing them is complicated due to a number of conditions that are difficult to satisfy in practice. These include the fact that the auction designer must be clairvoyant, in the sense that they must have reliable forecasts of participants’ valuation distributions in all future periods. Recently, Mirrokni et al. (2020) introduced a non-clairvoyant dynamic mechanism and showed that it is optimal within the class of dynamic mechanisms that do not rely on strong assumptions regarding knowledge about the future. We showed, however, that an optimal static mechanism (a Myerson auction) can under certain conditions outperform their dynamic mechanism. Here, we report data from an experiment designed to test the performance of the Mirrokni et al. (2020) mechanism in relation to the Myerson auction. Our results support the theory: the optimal non-clairvoyant dynamic mechanism either outperforms or underperforms the repeat static Myerson according to theory predictions. Our results highlight the practical importance of non-clairvoyant mechanisms as implementable approaches to dynamic auction design. The second chapter, co-authored with Daniel Houser, investigates the decision-making processes of human sellers when it comes to selecting dynamic mechanisms. We propose an experimental design to investigate how human sellers choose between two easily-conducted dynamic mechanisms: the optimal non-clairvoyant dynamic mechanism (NC) (Mirrokni et al., 2020) and the optimal repeated static mechanism (RS) (Myerson, 1981). Our results indicate that human sellers can harness their experience in an environment to choose the optimal mechanism later in the experiment. In addition, sellers tend to adjust their choice of mechanism based on past revenue. We further find that: (i) sellers generally overprice; and (ii) buyers participate less in NC due to the greater-than-suggested upfront fee, leading to the theoretical-experimental revenue gap. Our results shed light on how sellers choose dynamic mechanisms and can potentially help improve mechanism design. The third chapter, co-authored with Jingnan Chen, Erte Xiao, and Daniel Houser, shifts the focus to gender inequality in leadership positions within the workplace. Employing an online experiment, we scrutinize the efficacy of an easily implementable default (opt-out) approach in mitigating the gender disparity in willingness to contribute ideas. Our investigation encompasses two types of defaults: non-merit-based defaults, where individuals are randomly assigned to a leadership position for contributions (with the option to opt-out), and merit-based defaults, where individuals are placed in their default position based on their skills and abilities. Our findings reveal that defaults wield significant effects on mitigating the gender gap in willingness to contribute ideas. We find little evidence, however, that defaults mitigate stereotype bias in the willingness to contribute. Notably, both the random default and the merit-based default yield equivalent results in narrowing this gap. This study highlights the practical significance of the default option in fostering a more equitable working environment for women
Student Loan Mercenaries and National Security Consumers: Exploiting the AllVolunteer Force in the Global War on Terror
Get PDFThe Global War on Terror revealed that the all-volunteer force has fundamentally changed the relationship between the public and the military. This project fielded a survey to retrospectively capture the public’s knowledge and opinions on the military and Global War on Terror. The results showed that the public did not know the costs of the Global War on Terror; partially explained by policy choices designed to hide the costs from the public. This public’s ignorance and apathy was enabled by the proletarianization of the military that limited the rights of service members, made military service a condition to higher education funds, and the “volunteer effect” that softens public criticism with the veneer of consent. The public has become national security consumers who will indulge in war as long as someone else pays the costs and views military service as just another job causing lower support for military pay and benefits
Impact on Civilians from Fighting in El Fasher, North Darfur, May 9 - 27 2024
Get PDFThis report summarizes the consequences for civilians of fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF)/allied Darfur Joint Force (JF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in El Fasher, North Darfur, between May 9-27, 2024.Produced with the support of the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, United States Department of State
Assessing a New Measure of Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in the Federal Government
Get PDFThe Biden administration committed to strengthening the federal workforce through advancing diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA). Federal agencies are responsible for implementing and measuring the success of strategies to promote DEIA, such as diversity training. The purpose of this study was to assess the validity and performance of a new measure of DEIA in the federal government, the Office of Personnel Management’s (OPM) Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey (FEVS) DEIA index. Assessment of the index found that it demonstrated content validity and acceptable model fit, but may be better leveraged as separate scales and items for each dimension rather than as a composite measure. Testing the index for measurement invariance across race or ethnicity, gender, age, and disability status categories found that the measure performs consistently across demographic groups. Employees from underserved communities reported worse perceptions of the diversity climate than other employees. Examining the effect of diversity climate at an individual and organizational level on key workforce outcomes, turnover intention and perceived mission achievement, showed that positive individual perceptions of equity were associated with decreased turnover and positive individual perceptions of diversity, equity, and accessibility were associated with improved perceived mission achievement. However, these effects were weaker than the effects of other attitudinal variables, such as satisfaction, engagement, and performance confidence. Some of the agency-level measures of diversity climate were associated with outcomes, but effects were imprecise due to the data structure. The effects of individual and organizational demographics on the outcomes were mixed and inconsistent. Further research is needed to understand the DEIA index’s structure and how its dimensions interact with other attitudinal variables and with workforce and organizational outcomes. The DEIA index provides a unique opportunity for federal agency leaders to measure if diversity management strategies are effective in improving agency climate and outcomes