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Provenance of Upper Cretaceous to Paleocene strata in the Alberta foreland basin using detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology and (U-Th)/He thermochronology double dating
No full textFlexural foreland basins hold sedimentary records of paleoenvironment and hinterland erosion, making them useful for reconstructing the evolution of orogenic systems. The Turonian–Coniacian Cardium to Paleocene Paskapoo formations have been described in terms of their sedimentary facies and paleoenvironments, but the relationship to fold-thrust belt shortening is contested. Geochronology and low-temperature thermochronology datasets allow us connect Alberta foreland basin strata to tectonic and eustatic events. Here, we present a 1780 meter measured stratigraphic section and new detrital zircon U-Pb geochronology ages and (U-Th)/He thermochronology (ZHe) dates from Turonian–Coniacian formations. Turonian–Campanian sandstones interrupt marine shales and yield ZHe date populations that young up-section (Cardium Fm, ~148 Ma and ~319 Ma; Marshybank Fm, ~124 and ~278 Ma; Chinook Mbr, ~74 and ~139 Ma), reflecting progressive erosion into the fold-thrust belt. U-Pb ages indicate a Proterozoic-Ordovician fold-thrust belt source in the Turonian, and a shift to a more easterly Devonian-Triassic fold-thrust belt source in the Coniacian–Campanian, corresponding to punctuated transpression in the distal fold-thrust belt. Campanian–Paleocene sandstones record deltaic–nonmarine environments and fold-thrust shortening known as the “Rundle Pulse.” These units share age spectra indicating a dominant Neoproterozoic–Ordovician fold-thrust source, supporting unroofing of new sources following proximal uplift. ZHe date populations become older moving up-section in the Maastrichtian–Paleocene (Coalspur, ~59 Ma and ~187 Ma; Paskapoo, ~152 and ~226 Ma), reflecting foreland basin cannibalization. Reconstruction of the Alberta foreland basin clarifies sedimentary responses to climate, distal pulses of transpression, and fold-thrust belt shortening
HIDDEN ASSETS: AN INTERPRETATIVE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ANALYSIS OF TRANSLANGUAGING AS A WRITING RESOURCE FOR BILINGUAL COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS IN COMPOSITION I
No full textThis study explores how Spanish-English bilingual students navigated the “Standard English” language policy of their community college’s Composition I course by drawing on their natural translanguaging capabilities. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with students who completed the course within the past two years. Using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis and an asset perspective, the analysis revealed that the students leveraged five key assets to meet the language use expectations of Composition I: 1) Metalinguistic and Contextual Language Use Awareness, 2) Language Agency, 3) Self-Sufficiency, 4) Positive Bilingual Identity, and 5) Translanguaging. These findings advance the perception of translanguaging as a valid, effective, and linguistically equitable ideology and pedagogical approach in First-Year Writing instruction. This study ultimately demonstrates that translanguaging was a natural and vital aspect of the writing process for study participants. It suggests that First-Year Writing instructors should recognize multilingual students as skilled “translanguagers” who possess an inherent repertoire of abilities that support academic writing development, even when the students themselves may not fully recognize these skills. By embracing a translingual ideology, instructors can resist defaulting to deficit perceptions of language variety while respecting students’ rights to self-determination and language agency
Unions, Race, and the Uneven Rewards of Teaching
No full textThis study examines how racial income inequality persists within the teaching profession, a field often considered a pathway to stable, middle-class employment due to its standardized pay structures and strong union presence. This makes teaching a particularly revealing case for examining wage stratification within a predominantly public-sector and highly unionized occupation. Public-sector jobs are often noted for their government oversight, and unions are also recognized for promoting pay equity among union members. However, both systems operate within larger structures of inequality, which can limit their effectiveness in addressing wage disparities. By investigating the intersection of race and ethnicity, union membership, and wages, this research uncovers several mechanisms that disrupt or perpetuate wage disparities among teachers. This study uses data from the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (CPS MORG) from 1989 to 2023 to address the question: how does union membership intersect with race to influence wages among teachers? The analysis highlights the dual role unions play in disrupting and perpetuating wage disparities, revealing a nuanced relationship between union membership, race and ethnicity, and wages within the teaching profession. This underscores the complexities of labor stratification even in regulated environments. The teaching profession illustrates how institutional mechanisms like unionization interact with broader patterns of inequality, sometimes reproducing disparities they aim to dismantle. By focusing on the intersection of union membership and racial inequality in a public-sector profession, this study adds nuance to current debates on labor equity. It highlights how unions can both alleviate and reproduce disparities, depending on the broader institutional and historical contexts in which they operate
"A Dangerous Element": Politics of White Citizenship and Land Use in the Chickasaw Nation, 1866-1890
No full textIn 1866, the Chickasaw Nation signed a treaty with the United States that ushered in an era defined by access to Chickasaw land and citizenship. Chickasaw law stipulated that any citizen of the nation could utilize the land held in common so long as they could afford to work it. Chickasaws built homes, businesses, and a thriving economy through this process. But citizenship was not reserved only for Chickasaws-by-birth. Article 38 of the 1866 Treaty stipulated that any White person who married a Chickasaw citizen would be treated as though they were Chickasaw themselves. With the addition of non-citizens living in the nation, demand for land increased. Chickasaw politicians faced and resisted this demand and pressure to relinquish their sovereignty to non-citizens by constructing permit systems and limiting White access to Chickasaw lands. However, two competing visions of Chickasaw sovereignty emerged within the nation that culminated in the election of 1888. This thesis examines the political conflict of 1888, illustrating how Chickasaw politicians sought to preserve their nation’s autonomy and future in Indian Territory
"I am not mundane, I am divine" : a historical analysis of the women's spirituality movement in the United States from the 1970s to the 2020s
No full textThis thesis connects the Women’s Spirituality Movements that began in the 1970s and continued to develop through to the 2000s to the popularization of alternative spirituality in the more recent age of social media. Specifically, I examine the Women’s Spirituality movement that began in the 1970s which has maintained relevancy both academically and socially in varying degrees since its conception. My work will make relevant connections through a variety of different interdisciplinary methods such as historical analysis with primary source archival documents, an IRB approved survey, and oral history interviews. Throughout this thesis I illustrate the evolution of theories of religious development as feminist methodology and the ways in which this shift proved relevant to different social and political movements. The Women’s Spirituality Movement marked an important arc of feminist and lesbian spiritual development and culture. Indeed, the Women’s Spirituality Movement was able to establish legitimacy through the academic discoveries and theories of the women and the feminine divine as the spiritually significant. However, the Women’s Spirituality Movement encountered issues due to divergent viewpoints on transgender inclusion, and today many of the perspectives have become confused with conservative and influencer wellness content and the concept of "conspirituality.
Augmenting Hierarchical Visualizations with Topology-Centric Representations and Interactions
No full textAs Tufte emphasizes, “above all else, show the data”. Consistently highlighting key aspects of the data in visualizations ensures a more reliable, quick, and insightful understanding of data, particularly when interpreting various aspects of the data. This is particularly applicable for hierarchical data, which have many facets of relational information. A hierarchy is a system that organizes entities by rank, order, or importance, using parent-child relationships at its foundation. These relationships often result in derivation of various other kinds of relationships within the hierarchy, some of which are widely applicable and considered of primary importance across domains, while others are domain-specific and of special importance. Examples of these relationships include siblings, levels and paths. The nodes and edges that comprise these relationships are often collectively referred to as topologies by the visualization community. In our research, we further distinguish the topologies of single node and edge elements, referred to as basic topologies and those formed by sets of nodes and edges, which we term composite topologies. Having the ability to explicitly represent composite topologies and provide support for interactive operations on them is useful for revealing patterns, facilitating analysis, and drawing meaningful conclusions from hierarchical data. Tree visualizations are a subclass of hierarchical visualizations designed to represent data with strict parent-child relationships in a tree structure. These techniques emphasize visual clarity in conveying hierarchical depth and structural relationships. Existing tree visualization techniques and systems primarily focus on representing node entities and parent-child relationships between node entities, and to some extent supporting operations on nodes and edges. These visualizations often reveal various other composite topologies incidentally through their design. Some relationships, like parent-child relationships, are easier to interpret in these visualizations than composite topologies because they are explicitly represented. Other relationships represented by composite topologies require deliberate effort by users to interpret their structure from what they see. Explicit representation of composite topologies can allow users to see those topologies directly rather than discerning them from their constituent node and edge representations, opening new avenues for interactive data exploration and analysis of hierarchies. This research explores how existing tree visualizations represent information and how these visualizations can be extended to support representation of composite topologies and interactive operations on them. We examine the concept of topologies: the structures in a hierarchy, comprising nodes and edges, that constitute various relations. We develop a software architecture and a data pipeline to support tree visualization design, along with an implemented tree visualization system called Hieros. We conduct a user evaluation to study the usability and utility of representing various relations and interacting with them in tree visualizations. This dissertation makes five main research contributions. The first contribution is C4D3, a JavaScript-based coordination library for building coordinated multiple view visualizations using the D3 library for web-based visualizations. It is based on the Live Properties architecture of the Improvise visualization system. C4D3 aims to adapt and implement the coordination architecture of Improvise as an independent library that can be used with web-based visualization libraries such as D3, and eventually make it possible to build and coordinate tree visualizations via their topologies. The second contribution is a conceptual model of representative suitability, which is used to assess the capability and suitability of tree visualizations to represent the structures and their attributes in hierarchical data. The model aims to help in predicting how likely tree visualizations are to effectively visually represent specific topologies and the information associated with them. The third contribution is the design of Hieros, a tree visualization library with a modular software architecture and a hierarchical data pipeline. The architecture supports explicit representation of topologies and interactive operations on them at various stages of the visualization pipeline. The fourth contribution is a reference implementation of Hieros, a tree visualization library implemented in the Improvise visualization environment to support construction of topology-augmented tree visualizations. The fifth contribution is a user evaluation to assess the utility and usability of tree visualizations in explicitly representing topologies. Overall, this dissertation contributes to the systematic understanding of tree visualizations in terms of topological structures that form the building blocks of hierarchies, the building of a visualization system and data processing pipeline to support topology-centric tree visualizations, and demonstration of their application to a variety of knowledge domains
The Tired Helpers: How Media Synchronicity and Technology-Mediated Interpersonal Helping Impact Technostress in Remote Knowledge Work
No full textThe rise of remote work has highlighted the critical role of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) in shaping organizational behaviors. While ICTs help facilitate efficient communication and collaboration, they have also given rise to a pervasive issue, technostress — stress experienced by end-users in organizations as a result of their ICT use.. Technostress impacts employee well-being and productivity and is particularly important to understand in the growing context of remote work. This dissertation examines how Technology-Mediated Interpersonal Helping (TMIH), a form of extra-role Organizational Citizenship Behaviors (OCB) facilitated by ICTs, impacts employee well-being and productivity within remote knowledge work. Drawing on Media Synchronicity Theory, which explains how communication media supports coordinated communication, and Social Presence Theory, which describes the extent to which a communication medium conveys the realness of the interacting other, this dissertation offers a new perspective on technostress by exploring the cognitive and emotional mechanisms through which TMIH affects remote workers’ well-being and productivity. Two studies were conducted: the first study found that using synchronous ICTs to help coworkers while working remotely reduces interruption overload and psychological transition. Surprisingly, intensity and extended TMIH positively influences productivity. Lastly, interruption overload, psychological transition, and task closure served as key cognitive mediators linking TMIH with technostress outcomes. The second study examined social presence as an emotional mediator and was found to alleviate technostress and improve employee wellbeing. However, social presence also increased fatigue. This dissertation contributes to research by integrating Media Synchronicity Theory and Social Presence Theory to explain how TMIH shape technostress experiences in remote work. A key contribution of this dissertation is that media synchronicity helps alleviate technology-induced strain, offering a pathway for organizations to manage technostress through strategic ICT choices
An Excellence-Based View of Virtuous Motivation
No full textIn my dissertation I explore the nature of virtuous motivation. The output of this exploration is a novel account of virtuous motivation which I argue is preferable to approaches currently available within contemporary virtue ethics. More specifically, I aim to account for the kinds of reasons that motivate virtuous individuals when they act virtuously, which involves identifying the explicit reasons that motivate them when they act as well as implicit or deeper motives that are likewise operative, although in a different way. Throughout my work, I argue that there is a central concept or specific kind of motivating reason that consistently motivates virtuous persons when they act virtuously. This is the motive to exhibit excellence or virtue in some way whenever they act. I also refer to this as the concept of “agential excellence.” Because of this I call my view the excellence-based view of virtuous motivation, since the motive for excellence is both present and sufficiently motivating in every case of virtuous motivation. Although the excellence-based view is proposed as a novel approach to the topic of virtuous motivation, it borrows its conceptual framework from Aristotle’s account of virtue. However, I depart from this framework in a significant way. Aristotle thought that because eudaimonia (or a flourishing life) was our ultimate end, all of our choices and actions were ultimately for the sake of this end. For our motives, this meant that whatever choices we made and the reasons motivating our actions, these were motivated by our ultimate desire to flourish: including the motive to be virtuous. Several contemporary virtue-ethicists reflect Aristotle’s belief that eudaimonia plays a necessary role in the motivational structure of virtuous persons (I refer to these as eudaimonist accounts of virtuous motivation). One way they argue this is through the role eudaimonia must play in our practical rationality, specifically in terms of being the ultimate terminus within our reasoning. If eudaimonia is our ultimate end, then our choices and motivating reasons for whatever we do are rational insofar as they are connected to or grounded in this desire to flourish. And if our motives are to be virtuous, they must be rational in this sense. Ultimately, when constructing an account of virtuous motivation, the default position for contemporary virtue-ethicists that follow in Aristotle’s footsteps is to claim that eudaimonia is both central to and necessary for displaying virtuous motivation. In chapter 1, I both challenge the eudaimonist view of virtuous motivation and motivate my excellence-based view. To do this, I use an example inspired by a collection of letters written by several men and women who opposed the Nazi regime and were subsequently imprisoned and executed for their resistance. I refer to this example as the Letter-Writers case. The example is intended to demonstrate how the flourishing life may not have been possible for these individuals, who I take to be virtuous, but they were still motivated to maintain their character and act nobly, despite the horrific nature of their circumstances. I argue that it is plausible that thoughts of flourishing were not decisive in motivating the Letter-Writers to act and live in a virtuous way within this situation. In other words, they exhibited virtuous motivation without being motivated by eudaimonia. This paves the way for an excellence-based view, which places “agential excellence” rather than eudaimonia, as the central concept for understanding virtuous motivation. The concept of agential excellence is inspired by Aristotle’s view of virtue, according to which virtue is understood as the excellent functioning of human beings which makes them good human beings. Basically, humans can display excellence through cultivating and maintaining virtuous character traits, acting virtuously in consistent way, and through living excellent or virtuous lives. With this concept in hand, I go on to argue that the motivating reasons of the Letter-Writers can more plausibly be connected to and grounded in the concept of agential excellence, or excellence-based reasons, rather than eudaimonia and eudaimonist reasons. Chapter 2 extends the challenge against eudaimonist virtue ethics, specifically regarding their account of virtuous motivation towards others. Recall that the eudaimonist claims that all moral motivation ultimately traces back to a desire to flourish, which naturally extends to our motives to respect and act on behalf of others. However, much like in chapter 1, there are cases of individuals acting virtuously towards others who are not also motivated by their pursuit of their own eudaimonia. In other words, virtuous persons can act and be motivated in a virtuous way towards others without also considering their own flourishing. In light of this, I argue that the eudaimonist cannot account for such cases, insofar as they insist on a strong link between virtuous motivation and flourishing. I propose that the excellence-based view can better handle cases of virtuous motivation towards others. In such cases, virtuous actions towards others are motivated by a deep care and concern for them, combined with a desire to express that care excellently. Where deep other-concern and a desire to express that concern in a virtuous way are present, virtuous motivation emerges. For chapter 3, we take a bit of a detour. In chapters 1 and 2, virtuous motivation was largely influenced by the exercise of one’s practical rationality. And since there is a form of practical rationality or deliberation that is characteristic of virtuous persons and since both Aristotle and several contemporary virtue-ethicists claim that eudaimonia must guide this deliberation, the argument in chapter 3 challenges this view. I do this by considering cases where virtuous persons deliberate excellently about how to act and live but do not employ a conception of a flourishing life when doing so. Perhaps such individuals deliberate in accordance with what is virtuous to do, what expresses a virtuous character, or what is consistent with a virtuous life. These considerations led me to propose an “excellence-based view of practical wisdom”, which claims that practical wisdom can always be guided by the concept of agential excellence, whether this is situated within a broader desire to flourish. And when guided by agential excellence, one can deliberate effectively to determine what’s best to do for any circumstance. Thus, the excellence-based view provides a plausible alternative to eudaimonist accounts of practical wisdom. I also argue that an excellence-based view is preferable to the eudaimonist view, since agential excellence can provide consistent deliberative guidance across different lives and when agential excellence guides practically wise deliberation, this still positions us well to attain a flourishing life. In chapter 4, I return to the main discussion of virtuous motivation and consider alternative virtue-ethical approaches to the topic. The alternatives I have mind are Stoicism (in both ancient and contemporary form), Michael Slote’s care-based ethics, and Christine Swanton’s target-centered virtue ethics. The goal of this chapter was to illustrate how an excellence-based view of virtuous motivation fares better than these alternative views. To do this, I examine each alternative view to show what their account of virtuous motivation would look like alongside its merits and deficiencies. The upshot of considering these alternative views is that an excellence-based view can incorporate the attractive elements of each view, it can avoid the problems of such views, and, most importantly, can capture what can be found in every instance of virtuous motivation
Negative expressions as parts of logos in Plato’s Sophist
No full textIn the thesis, I offer an interpretation of the middle part of the Sophist, according to which its goal is to construct an account of meaningful language (logos) that welcomes negativity. I argue that non being is a part of logos in two senses: as negative predicates (257b-c) and as false statements (259e-263d). Following the incompatible property range view proposed by Lesley Brown, I argue that Plato’s account of negative predication is about internal negation, as opposed to external negation defended by scholars such as G.E.L. Owen. Further, I argue that according to Plato, meaningful language is a proper mixture of heterofunctional parts of speech: subjects and predicates. The improper mixture of a subject with a predicate results in a false statement. However, a false statement is still a part of logos, because it takes the wrong predicate from the right predicate-range