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An alias of I
No full textAn Alias of I is a manuscript of poems that emerge from familial myth into the sensoria and materiality of the Anthropocene, expanding from claustrophobic New Jersey suburbia to ancestral and rented homes in Malacca, Hong Kong, New York, California, and elsewhere. Blending temporality and locality, these movements through space incite explorations of the self, parsing consciousness, interiority, and perception. These poems reckon with inherited violence and the throughline of colonialism, immigration, and intergenerational trauma.
An Alias of I investigates identity and inheritance through the lens of queerness, neurodivergence, and Asian American diaspora. At once familiar and alien, these poems render modernity and selfhood into a landscape where the boundaries between bodies, environments, and stories—past and present—all blur. These meditations on trauma, loss, and mundanity reveal new possibilities that materialize through joy, intimacy, and found signs. An Alias of I embraces hybrid forms, blending prose, lyric, visual, and narrative poems, to explore emotional processing and rationalization through various angles and perspectives, attempting to capture the movement—focus points, detours, ruminations—of an evasive mind working toward an end.
As the title insinuates, the poems interrogate the mutability and instability of personhood. Through these poems, readers are asked to reckon with the gap between externality—who they want to be, how they want to be perceived, desires—and the internal, elusive self. From this tension emerges the difficulty and transcendence of intimacy and community. These poems guide readers through these spaces and worlds with humor, nonchalance and a sense of possibility, inviting readers to keep an open eye.M.F.A.Includes bibliographical reference
The madman's fortune
No full textThe Madman’s Fortune is a novel about the thin line between fiction and real life, desire and delusion, and translation and creation. Set in New York City, a man unravels when his husband disappears and leaves him with an enigmatic younger man as a houseguest. The protagonist, a former window dresser and househusband whose knowledge of Portuguese is questionable, begins to translate into English a story about a lonely museum director who becomes enraptured with a British expatriate. The amateur translator soon loses the distinction between the story he’s translating and his own life.M.F.A.Includes bibliographical reference
Navigating uncertainty: the temporalities of asylum seeking in Cape Town, South Africa
No full textThere is little scholarly attention paid to self-settled asylum seekers and refugees living outside of refugee camps in Africa. Specifically, the lack of research on residential mobility and survival strategies means little is known about refugee resistance and experiences living through the precarious conditions specifically tied to protracted displacement in African cities. This three-article dissertation delves into the experiences of refugees seeking asylum in Cape Town, South Africa by exploring the intricate relationship between uncertainty and agency. It challenges the traditional perception of refugees as passive victims, highlighting their resilience and their tactical navigation of complex bureaucratic hurdles. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with 74 refugees, this dissertation critically examines the temporalities of displacement, revealing how refugees actively engage in strategies of survival, build social connections, and even engage in political acts of protest and refusal. The first article focuses on how bureaucratic systems and restrictive policies produce and amplify uncertainty by exposing refugees to economic vulnerability, administrative delays, and the ongoing threat of secondary displacements during the refugee status determination process. The second article combines in-depth ethnographic analysis and the use of GIS mapping to trace refugees' housing trajectories. This article reveals how their residential mobility challenges the linear temporal continuum of uncertainty normally assumed in the forced migration literature by exposing the cyclical and concurrent nature of the multiple uncertainties experienced because of residential mobility. The third article examines the major 2019-2020 refugee protest in Cape Town’s city center, exploring how refugees employed acts of refusal as a tool for disrupting imposed temporalities and demanding greater control over their futures. This dissertation makes significant contributions and introduces the theoretical concepts of the "runaround" and "temporal appropriation" as frameworks for interpreting the temporal registers of the challenges faced by refugees and their agentic solutions respectively. This dissertation makes visible the experience of navigating uncertainty while also drawing attention to the institutions, authorities, and circumstances that produce or contribute to the uncertainty.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Last steps to the “Aha!” - recognizing the isomorphism
No full textThis is Analytic 1 (of 4) of "Last steps to the ’Aha!’ - Recognizing the Isomorphism: A Series of Four Analytics"
This first Analytic marks a significant step in the mathematical explorations of Shelly, Stephanie, Amy-Lynn, and Robert. The students draw upon their rich history of combinatorial reasoning as they continue to delve into the 4-Topping Pizza Problem. At this juncture, they continue to lay groundwork for uncovering the isomorphic relationships connecting solutions to Pizza and Tower problems using Pascal’s Triangle as an intermediary, which will be elaborated upon in Analytics 2 through 4. Their discussions and discoveries in this session are instrumental in their journey toward recognizing the structural relationships common across the counting problems they have explored in earlier years (Maher & Martino, 1996).
The students attempt to use algorithmic procedures and calculations before returning to a sense-making analysis of the underlying structures that govern combinatorial problems. This aligns with Goldin’s (2000) emphasis on the importance of multiple representation systems in mathematical problem-solving. The Analytic sets the stage for the more sophisticated connections that will be established with the structure of Pascal’s Triangle and the Tower and Pizza Problems in subsequent Analytics.
During this session, the students engage in a reflective dialogue on previous problem-solving experiences, drawing parallels between the current problem and familiar contexts. This introspection leads to a renewed consideration of the combination formula and its applicability. As they grapple with the problem, they express a preference for visual and contextual methods over mere computation, demonstrating the kind of flexible problem-solving approach observed in longitudinal studies of mathematical reasoning (Francisco & Maher, 2005; Krupnik, 2020).
Problem Statement:
"A local pizza shop has asked us to help design a form to keep track of certain pizza choices. They offer a plain pizza that is cheese and tomato sauce. A customer can then select from the following toppings: pepper, sausage, mushrooms, and pepperoni. How many different choices for pizza does a customer have? List all the choices. Find a way to convince each other that you have accounted for all possible choices. Suppose a fifth topping, anchovies, were available. How many different choices for pizza does a customer now have? Why?"
References
Maher, C. A., & Martino, A. M. (1996). The development of the idea of mathematical proof: A 5-year case study. Journal for Research in Mathematics Education, 27(2), 194-214.
Krupnik, V. (2020). Early development and application of proof-like reasoning: Longitudinal case studies. Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. PhD dissertation.
Goldin, G. A. (2000). Affective pathways and representation in mathematical problem solving. Mathematical Thinking and Learning, 2(3), 209-219.
Francisco, J. M., & Maher, C. A. (2005). Conditions for promoting reasoning in problem solving: Insights from a longitudinal study. The Journal of Mathematical Behavior, 24(3-4), 361-372.
Teehan, K. (2019). A longitudinal case study tracing growth in mathematical understanding through the lens of the Pirie-Kieren theory. Rutgers University. Dissertation
American security, global disability: a postcolonial disability studies analysis of American security projects
No full textThis dissertation aims to reconceptualize the idea of security by first focusing on the extensive debilitation left in the aftermath of its pursuit. It assesses how we can understand the persistent production of debilitation across different modes of security - national, economic, energy, and environmental – from the mid-20th century to the present. I focus on three U.S. security projects that represent these different modes: nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, Texaco's oil operations in the Ecuadorian Amazon, and cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which supplies U.S.-based multinational corporations. I demonstrate that security functions according to a colonial and biopolitical logic in which value is extracted from the mass impairment of racialized and Indigenous populations and their ecologies.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Birthday suits
No full textBirthday Suits explores the way comedy and tragedy heighten one another, vacillating quickly in tone and register across four sections. Comedy, here, is expressed through the colloquial voice, jokes and bits, and anecdotes. Tragedy is taken loosely: rendered through dramatic monologue, exaggerated personas, and ‘acting out’ scenarios.
Birthday Suits is broadly concerned with costume, masking, and staging as these concepts relate to disability, the aftermath of sexual and domestic violence, genderqueerness, and sexuality. First ruminating on audience and performance, the poems reckon with the sensation of being on stage, constantly perceived and judged, magnified by the spotlight of trauma. With this context, the following section investigates the speaker’s use of mask and costume over time as they relate to gender expression and Sapphism.
The third section grows tense as the speaker becomes increasingly frustrated with their desire to ‘role-play,’ or reenact, traumatic moments from their life. Birthday Suits ends with an examination of how experiences with death and the unruly body might disrupt these performances—or create ones of their own.
Through clipped lines, disjointed syntax and register, and loosely ekphrastic responses, Birthday Suits engages in a broader conversation with other lesbian and trans poets and artists. It is a reckoning with the ways we “play out” our lives and how prescribed roles—and attempts to break free from them—might cause harm; even, and especially, with the people we most trust.M.F.A.Includes bibliographical reference
Girlhood after dark: nighttime, leisure, and the temporality of gender
No full textStructures of inequality often operate through the social (de)valuation of people’s time. While much scholarship has explored the spatial workings of oppression, there has been less attention to the role of time in perpetuating these structures. This dissertation investigates how capitalist time conditions gender performance across intersecting systems of oppression. I trace how everyday experiences of socio-political subjugation map onto capitalist temporal imperatives of productivity and value. To do so, the project centers a critical cultural analysis of the night. Bridging intersectional and Marxist feminist, critical race, and queer theory, I theorize how nighttime is imperative to, and resistant of, heteropatriarchal racial capitalism’s grip over the temporal organization of life. This study uncovers the temporal regulation of gender through investigating a unique capitalist subject: the girl. Building from Marxist feminist theories of social reproduction, this project argues that the figure of the girl illuminates how gender becomes serviceable to capitalist productivity through time. With limited control over the rhythms of her day and much hand-wringing over her (re)productive future, the girl is conditioned by the temporal dialectic of clock-time and future-time. By engaging histories of thought around free time and “unproductive” labor, I focus on one experience of time that illuminates both the strictures of capitalist temporality and the interstitial moments that escape it: girls’ nighttime leisure. To do this, I trace how the night appears in current scholarship, policy, legal histories, and popular culture around girl’s engagement with private, public, and digital timespaces. As one of the most devalued activities at the most unproductive time of the capitalist day, girls’ nighttime leisure is a fruitful timespace to explore the reach of capitalist temporal control in all facets of life. By bridging Marxist feminist theorizing with critical cultural analyses of media and popular culture, Girlhood After Dark extends feminist epistemologies of the “everyday” to attend to the transgressive possibilities of the “every night.”Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Three essays on anomaly detection in accounting: channel stuffing, journal entry testing, and graph learning
No full textThe advent of computer technology and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems such as SAP have significantly transformed the accounting field. These advancements facilitated a surge in the volume of accounting data and triggered an unprecedented shift in data recording methods within organizations. In addition, the complexity of transactions is further heightened by globalization and diverse business models. Regardless of these evolutions in data volume and recording methodologies, the mandate for auditors to audit journal entries remains consistent. These requirements, as specified by the International Auditing and Assurance Standards Board (IAASB 2009) and the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (PCAOB 2020a), require auditors to consider fraud in financial statement auditing. This dissertation emphasizes the application of anomaly detection methods within the fields of accounting and auditing. The first essay utilizes statistical analyses and unsupervised outlier detection approaches in tackling the issue of channel stuffing, which has become a concern for management, auditors, and regulatory bodies. Particularly for multinational corporations, supervising cross-country sales activities and ensuring accurate recording of sales revenue is challenging work. This research proposes an advanced channel stuffing detection method for thoroughly examining a company’s sales activities.
The second essay aims to establish a framework for systematically evaluating Manual Journal Entries (MJEs), thereby assisting management in enhancing control procedures over MJEs. A combination of traditional rule-based analysis, natural language processing, and deep learning is used to achieve this goal. Initially, transactions are scrutinized based on rule-based tests. Subsequently, a deep autoencoder neural network further detects potential anomalous journal entries. Finally, textual data is analyzed to identify atypical textual information.
The third essay applies graph learning and graph neural networks to uncover irregular transactions. Given the double-entry bookkeeping mechanism, every transaction is recorded in at least two accounts, with one debited and another credited. This debit-credit relationship generates unique links that can be represented in graph format. While numerical and categorical data have been extensively studied, relational data in journal entries remain relatively unexplored. This essay explores learning graph representations from journal entry data to capture the relationships between general ledger accounts and uncover hidden patterns and insights in auditing.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Graph learning for financial networks
No full textThe emergence of real-world financial networks, such as the inter-bank market, over-the-counter (OTC) bond market, and cryptocurrency market, has led to an increasing interest in their applications. These applications include risk propagation, crisis prevention, fraud detection, anti-money laundering, and anomaly detection. In this paper, we focus on the challenge of understanding and predicting the trading behaviors for the OTC corporate bond dealer network. Addressing this challenge is crucial, as accurate predictions can play a key role in preventing the spread of risk and minimizing losses if a dealer encounters financial trouble. We introduce a continuous dynamic network link prediction approach that incorporates neighborhood message aggregation. This method enhances our ability to understand and leverage the local structure of the network, resulting in improved prediction accuracy. This thesis comprises three chapters. The first chapter explores the topological structure of the dealer network, examining them in both static and dynamic contexts. We demonstrate that dealers' topological importance within the network varies considerably, with different dealers assuming distinct roles. Additionally, we find that the importance of trading relationships varies, with some being more critical than others. The second chapter investigates the connection between dealers' topological significance within the network and their behavior in the bond market. We found that dealers with greater topological importance tend to leverage their position for an advantage in the corporate bond market. In the third chapter, we introduced a continuous dynamic network link prediction method that utilizes neighborhood message aggregation to predict links within the dealer network. Traditional approaches often involve aggregating network data over specific time windows to create snapshots. However, this strategy has two main limitations. First, changing the length of the aggregation window can result in varying outcomes. Second, the network's topology and the market's trading volume can change abruptly. Therefore, a shift to a continuous dynamic framework is essential to address these challenges. In conclusion, our research focuses on analyzing dealer behaviors within the OTC bond market, with the aim of forecasting their future actions in a continuous dynamic setting. This study provides a strategic tool for the corporate bond dealer network to mitigate risk dissemination and reduce potential losses, particularly in scenarios where dealers face financial difficulties.Ph.D.Includes bibliographical reference
Improving nursing wellness, engagement, and resiliency via a digital repository at New Jersey Nursing Emotional Well-Being Institute
No full textPurpose of Project: The purpose of this project was to address the current disengagement, burn out, and lack of central wellness resources in our nursing workforce via the creation of a digital repository. The establishment of a digital repository at New Jersey Nursing Emotional Well-Being Institute (NJ-NEW) can provide an open-access easily accessible and central location of evidence-based collections of wellness, engagement, and resiliency resources, strategies, and interventions which may lead to the improvement of nursing well-being. Digital wellness repositories are an emerging and unexplored phenomenon. Methodology: This quality improvement (QI) project was based on qualitative techniques and the data collection tools included focused group interview methods with a panel of experts (10 invited). A thematic analysis was utilized to identify and define themes. Current evidence was collected, and a review of literature was completed.
Results: The review of current literature supported the use of digital repository websites as a multifaceted approach to managing stress and building nursing resilience, engagement, and wellness. Digital repositories allow the availability of a multitude of evidence-based resources, digital interventions, knowledge, communication, and collaboration sharing to be housed in one easily accessible convenient and welcoming location. The six participants focus group data collection identified and defined 10 themes which included accessibility, aesthetics, broad approach, consistency with language, engagement, health burden, multifaceted approach, nurse mental health, evidence-based research, and wellness responsibility.
Implications for Practice: Open access wellness repository resource is now available for all leaders and nurses. Future studies are needed to determine the effectiveness of the repository for nurses at NJ-NEW.D.N.P.Includes bibliographical reference