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Atonement for the Unions: The True Story of How the US Got Its Minimum Wage and What It Means Now
No full textThis paper examines the crucial role national labor unions played in the implementation of a minimum wage in the United States. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, union membership was widespread and deeply influential. Vastly exceeding today’s numbers, unionized workers organized effectively to challenge exploitative labor conditions. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) established a federal minimum wage in response to these conditions. While contemporary scholarship often credits President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, such focus overlooks the sustained pressure of organized labor. Strikes, sit-ins, and collective actions–including the Haymarket Affair (1886) and Pullman Strike (1894)–generated public and political urgency. This paper highlights how national unions like the American Federation of Labor and the Congress of Industrial Organizations amplified these local movements, coordinated lobbying efforts, and helped secure legislative action. Their influence shaped the FLSA and redefined labor standards for future generations of American workers
Semantic and Pragmatic Analysis of Chinese Internet Neologisms
No full textThis dissertation presents a semantic and pragmatic analysis of Chinese internet neologisms, investigating their role as a pivotal linguistic and cultural phenomenon in the digital era. It addresses two questions: How are Chinese internet neologisms formed, and what underlying patterns and rules govern the semantics and pragmatics of Chinese internet neologisms? The study argues these expressions are more than ephemeral slang; they are linguistic tools that encapsulate collective identities, emotions, and social narratives, reflecting the anxieties, humor, and values of digitally native generations in contemporary China. The dissertation adopts a qualitative, data-driven approach, integrating multiple theoretical frameworks to construct a comprehensive model. The methodology combines Componential Analysis, Prototype Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, and corpus-based semantic analysis to examine the internal structure and meaning-making strategies of neologisms. A curated corpus of 73 expressions was compiled from major Chinese social media platforms like Weibo, Douyin, and Xiaohongshu, selected for their frequency, diversity, and relevance. This multi-theoretical lens allows a nuanced examination of both semantic mechanisms and context-dependent pragmatic uses of digital expressions. The analysis identifies five primary mechanisms for the creation and evolution of Chinese internet neologisms: metaphor and conceptual mapping, homophonic wordplay, code-mixing, semantic shift and extension, and pragmatic expressiveness, where terms serve social functions such as emotional marking, solidarity, irony, and identity construction. The dissertation explores how these neologisms function as vehicles for social critique, emotional catharsis, and community bonding, effectively navigating online censorship and shaping digital communication. The findings have implications for Chinese language education, digital literacy, AI-driven sentiment analysis, and cross-cultural communication. The dissertation advocates incorporating neologisms into pedagogy to enhance student engagement and cultural competence. Limitations include the rapidly evolving nature of online language and focus on specific platforms, which may affect generalizability. Future research should employ longitudinal designs, broaden digital communities studied, and develop advanced natural language processing models capable of interpreting irony, humor, and cultural nuance to deepen understanding of their impact on language and society.Master of Arts (M.A.
BIOMECHANICS, MUSCLE ACTIVITY, AND GAIT COMPLEXITY DURING WALKING WITH FATIGUE-INDUCED KNEE EXTENSOR IMPAIRMENT
No full textDeclines in knee extensor (KE) strength are associated with mobility impairment, risk of knee osteoarthritis (OA), and risk of falls with advancing age. Prior work has attempted to use KE muscle fatigue to study the impact on gait mechanics, however these studies mostly focus on the knee joint and surrounding musculature and often focus only on the sagittal plane or involved only unilateral fatigue. Purpose: The overall aim of this dissertation is to quantify the causal impact of KE muscle strength on age-related alterations in movement patterns using bilateral KE fatigue. We had 3 primary hypotheses: 1) that KE fatigue would shift biomechanics and muscle coordination towards that of aging gait associated with mobility impairment, 2) that KE fatigue will alter 3D knee biomechanics and muscle activity that is consistent with theoretical risk of knee osteoarthritis, and 3) that KE fatigue will change complexity, variability structure, of CoM acceleration during walking consistent with increased risk of falls or pathological gait. Methods: 29 young healthy adults (18F/11M) ages 18-35yrs (23±4.6yrs) performed 2 bilateral KE fatigue protocols where fatigue was quantified as change in maximum isometric torque (MVIC). We compared biomechanics and muscle activity at baseline and after each of the two fatigue protocols where individuals experienced an average decline in MVIC of ~10% and ~20% after each protocol respectively. Results: We found no changes in ankle biomechanics post-fatigue for either protocol. After the second fatigue protocol we found reduced hip and knee range of motion along with reduced propulsion and braking forces, and increased stride frequency all suggesting shorter step lengths. With regard to muscle activity patterns we observed a shift towards more proximal muscle activity paired with a shift towards earlier plantar flexor muscle activity with decreased activity before push off. With the exception of no changes in ankle mechanics these findings are as would be expected with aging gait. With regard to risk of knee OA we found that after the longer fatigue protocol there were changes in femoral translation and rotation relative to the tibia along with more co-activity of the KE and hamstrings through the stance phase of gait. Lastly, we found a decrease in CoM acceleration fractal dimension suggesting reduced complexity and adaptability of gait after the longer KE fatigue protocol. Conclusions: This study was the first of its kind to quantify biomechanics, muscle coordination, co-activation, and activity patterns using two bilateral KE fatigue protocols. We determined that magnitude of fatigue induced when quantified as MVIC is important for whether or not we can detect changes in mechanics. While we did not elicit changes in ankle mechanics we did see changes in muscle activity that may proceed changes in mechanics. We also saw other features of aging gait related to mobility impairment, knee OA, and fall risk suggesting the KE muscles play an important role in declines gait function with age.University of Massachusetts SPHHS Dean's Dissertation Completion Award (Summer Fellowship)
University of Massachusetts Graduate School Dissertation Grant
University of Massachusetts Pricilla M. Clarkson Graduate ScholarshipDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.
Narrativizing Change Through Literacy Infrastructures: A Study of Community Writing at UMass Amherst
No full textThis dissertation is a participatory action research (PAR) case study of one community writing course, "Voices of UMass: A Memoir Writing Course for Workers and Students," piloted on-campus in Spring 2022 and designed to create solidarity among workers and students through storytelling. Specifically, this study examines the writing practices and pursuits of eleven participants in the community writing course to expand a theory of "literacy infrastructure," which is used to describe the physical, material, and rhetorical structures that come to form the academic institution, including classroom space; literacy materials, practices, and activities; socio-cultural values, or norms; and "people themselves" (Grabill). Together, a theoretical framework composed of community literacy, critical race theory (CRT), and affect theory inform this study's analysis of participants' experiences, practices, and pursuits in the community writing course as they created memoir—within the literacy infrastructure. Crafted through participant observation methods; discourse-based interviews; and rhetorical analysis of participants' writing, the body chapters of this dissertation present three vital lenses into the literacy infrastructure at UMass. Ultimately, this study expands literacy infrastructure in two important ways: 1) It includes in the "campus community" not onlystudents, teachers, or the classroom but the great population of workers—and the Partnership for Worker Education (PWE)—who inhabit campus, daily; and 2) It demonstrates how the literacy infrastructure is a lived and felt (i.e. affective) experience; and a porous and makeshift entity, created and re-created by people.Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.
DIVERSIFYING THE BEHAVIORAL HEALTH WORKFORCE: CREATING ALTERNATIVE SPACES AND EFFECTIVE MENTORSHIP FOR DIVERSE BEHAVIORAL HEALTH GRADUATE STUDENTS
No full textThe purpose of this study was to explore the lived experiences of diverse behavioral health graduate students and practitioners in the workforce, their perceptions of and experiences with receiving and providing mentorship, and their experiences participating in the pilot of the BIRCh Fellows Program. Participants included four mentee and four mentor individuals identifying as belonging to marginalized and/or minoritized identities in behavioral health graduate programs and fields. Data were collected from two individual interviews with each participant, descriptive field notes, and the researcher’s journal. Data analysis followed the process of the hermeneutic circle in line with the interpretive phenomenological analysis (Smith et al., 2022) steps.
There are a limited number of studies that explore intentional and effective mentorship of behavioral health graduate students. The intent of this qualitative study was to investigate the ways in which providing explicit mentorship to graduate students in behavioral health programs can act as a recruitment and retention strategy, promote program and career satisfaction, and diversify the behavioral health workforce through shared community and knowledge creation.
This study found that access to explicit and intentional mentorship has been a sense of encouragement for graduate students to continue their pursuit of a behavioral health career and is a feature of graduate education that current practitioners wish for the future of behavioral health graduate programs.Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.
Residential Environments and Quality of Life in US Senior Care Communities
No full textOlder adults in the United States often relocate to receive assistance as their functional abilities decline. An increasingly popular form of senior care provides housing and a continuum of care services within a designated community campus. These communities are spatially and socially divided into residential zones where care is provided at varying intensity levels. This dissertation project aimed to identify personal and environmental variables that support the well-being of residents in US continuum-care communities. Data were collected from residents of two communities in southern California, one religiously unaffiliated and the other Jewish. Semi-structured interviews, standardized questionnaires, and ecological momentary assessment methods were used to document residential experiences and environmental conditions across different levels of care within these communities. Data were analyzed using qualitative and quantitative techniques to identify characteristics of people and places that supported residents’ well-being. Analyses were conducted to examine associations between (1) feeling at home and quality of life, (2) time-use and mood, and (3) religiosity and mental health. Results showed that a longer duration of residence, the presence of personal belongings, and privacy were associated with feeling at home in one’s living space, which in turn was associated with a better quality of life. Spending time outdoors, exercising, and being with loved ones were associated with better momentary mood. Intrinsic religiosity, defined as a personal and internalized commitment to one’s religious worldview, was associated with better mental health. Overall, experiences of well-being did not differ significantly between the two communities but did differ across the levels of care within them. People living in less intense care zones reported more positive residential experiences. These findings suggest that an environment that feels like home and provides access to nature, movement, and meaningful socialization can support the well-being of older adults with declining health.Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Interactive Conversational Search and Recommendation
No full textBy enabling retrieval and recommender systems to dynamically obtain user pref- erences through conversations with users, conversational search and recommendation have become increasingly popular in recent years. This process starts with receiving a request from the user and continues with asking clarifying questions or suggesting some possible items or documents by the system. In this way, the system can get valuable feedback from users to accurately determine the users’ needs. This process repeats until the search or recommendation is successful or the user accepts defeat.
Due to the dynamic nature of conversational tasks, an agent needs to be trained to decide on different actions (e.g., asking a question or recommending an item) at each turn of the conversation while learning a unified policy for these decisions. If the agent decides to ask a question, the value of each question in the conversation is unknown at the outset. Therefore, the agent must be trained to predict the value of a question based on the context provided by previous turns. Moreover, not all words in the user’s responses are useful, so the agent must learn to effectively use only the most relevant information. In this thesis, we aim to address all of these challenges.
Advances in deep reinforcement learning techniques provide new opportunities for interactive conversational search and recommendation. We study how to develop agents with deep reinforcement learning for conversational search and recommendation in order to have flexible interaction with users to satisfy them by reaching the goal of the conversation.
We believe that a good solution for this task should have these features: 1) asking appropriate personalized questions in the right order to bring the system closer to the target item; 2) showing some items during the conversation to get some feedback from the user; 3) making the conversation as short as possible; 4) finding appropriate items from a massive collection of possibilities; 5) extracting relevant information from the user’s utterances and using it in the retrieval or recommendation in the next turn of the conversation.
To capture these features, we first introduce a model based on an Actor-Critic algorithm to jointly learn the dialogue policy and recommendation model at the same time. To address the challenge of selecting items from a vast collection of possibilities, we introduce a tree-structured Actor for this task, where a balanced hierarchical clustering tree is built over the items/questions. Selecting an item/question is framed as navigating a path from the root to a specific leaf of the tree. In each round of the conversation, the proposed model can offer simultaneous recommendations, provided that modality and screen real estate allow. Secondly, we explore the problem of generating relevant questions for conversational product search by maximizing any desired metric (i.e., the ultimate goal of the conversation), objectives, or even an arbitrary user satisfaction signal. We argue that the true values of questions in a conversation are inherently unknown, as the significance of a question can vary based on context, individual perspectives, and the evolving nature of the discussion. Therefore, we estimate the true value of questions by analyzing their answers and their relation to the primary goal of the conversation. We also explore how Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate funnel questions to clarify user preferences during a conversation. Finally, we study the problem of extracting relevant information from the user’s utterances in a conversation.This work was supported in part by the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, in part by NSF grant #IIS-1617408, in part by NSF grant #1813662, in part by Amazon, and in part by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) via AFRL contact #FA8650-17-C-9116 under subcontract #94671240 from the University of Southern California. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the sponsors.Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.
Kingsnake
No full textThere is nothing to say which the poems can’t say themselves. They started one night on a typewriter in CAConrad’s apartment while I was housesitting. From there it was just a matter of chasing the rest down or letting them surprise me. They’re derived from family stories, dreams, drug trips, past loves, hookups, horror movies, transmissions from my spiritual patron, political anxieties, sessions of psychoanalysis, small towns both up north and down south, New York, and my own gender transition. They document the mess of my early 20s and my own burgeoning practices as an expat southerner, poet, mystic, and transexual. I’m sure I’ll be embarrassed by most of them in 5-10 years.
If you want to hear about theory, process, and influence, read the introduction. If you have faith in poetry, read the fucking poems.Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)2030-05-1
Physicochemical Properties and Gelation Behavior of Protein-rich, Edible Jatropha curcas as a Climate-Resilient Food Ingredient
No full textJatropha curcas, a plant able to grow in drought or arid conditions, holds significant promise as a sustainable protein source for food structuring applications. This study explores the physicochemical properties and gelation behavior of whole and defatted J. curcas kernel powders to assess their potential in designing functional food matrices. Initially, the compositional and structural characteristics of whole and defatted kernels were analyzed, revealing distinct differences in protein structure, solubility, and interfacial properties due to lipid removal. Defatting led to more protein aggregation and compactness in the kernels, as observed by the increased β-sheet content and inferior interfacial properties. Subsequently, the study examined the effects of reintroducing J. curcas oil into defatted kernel dispersions to tailor gel properties. By modulating lipid concentrations, changes in gel firmness, rheology, and water-loss rate under thermal and enzymatic gelation conditions were analyzed. Results indicated that particle-binding effects significantly influence protein network formation, affecting gel elasticity and stability. Additionally, comparisons between heat- and enzyme-induced gels demonstrated distinct microstructural modifications based on lipid-protein interactions. These insights highlight the potential of J. curcas proteins for novel gel-based food formulations, emphasizing whole-seed utilization strategies to enhance sustainability. By leveraging intrinsic seed components, this study contributes to the development of functional, plant-based food structures with customizable textural attributes.Master of Science (M.S.)2026-05-1
Fog & Other Stories
No full textThese two stories and novella explore belonging, class, and family through dislocation.Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)2030-05-1