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The Role of Care Practices, Mutual Aid, and Racial Formation in Black Newcomer Practitioners’ Lived Experience Within Organizations: A Critical Qualitative Inquiry
No full textBlack newcomers, defined as people who have migrated to the United States regardless of legal status, are one of the fastest-growing immigrant groups. (Morgan-Trostle et al., 2016). Within this population, a small percentage work within the social service sector with other migrants. Using critical qualitative methods, a critical phenomenological methodology and semi-structured interviews, a sample of 17 participants were asked about their experiences of living and working in the U.S. social service sector. The study uses racial formation theory (Omi & Winant, 2014) to conceptualize how participants experienced their racial identity formation and how racism shapes their personal and professional roles. The study also employed a Black feminist theoretical lens to understand how participants gave and received care, support, and mutual aid in their personal and professional lives.
Seventeen participants who identified as Black or part of the African diaspora, worked with new arrivals or within the newcomer social service sector as direct service providers, and were at least 18 years old were interviewed. Participants resided in four regions across the continental United States and came from 14 counties across continental Africa and the Caribbean Islands. The research questions were analyzed using two different analytical methods. First, a thematic analysis (Padgett, 2017) and then a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2012) were employed to learn about the lived experience of the sample. Findings included a relational circle of care that reconsidered the giver-receiver binary and centers community and notions of reciprocity, mutuality, and the interconnection between personal and professional. Additional findings highlighted the ways participants accented English led to experiences of racism and xenophobia that shaped their personal and professional roles. Finally, participants shared insights into the ways their relationship with America shaped their claims or rejection of the African American identity distinction. A novel finding from this study suggested that participants did not share anti-Black sentiments but rather rejected U.S. centrism. This study expanded the empirical research that elucidated the experiences of Black newcomers who work within the social service sector
Participant 06 – English, Chinese, and Minnan
Get PDFAn interview with Henry Xu, a multilingual undergraduate student at the University of Denver, about the benefits and challenges of multilingualism in education as part of Professor Kamila Kinyon\u27s Multilingual DU study
How Short-Term Rentals Impact Summit County, Colorado, Spatially and Economically: A GIS Analysis
Get PDFSummit County, Colorado, is experiencing a housing crisis influenced by the rise of short-term rentals (STRs). This project investigates how STRs spatially and economically impact the county. STRs are regarded as a reason for the housing crisis as they take away long-term housing from locals and increase housing market prices. Locals are forced to look for housing in neighboring counties such as Clear Creek, Eagle, Grand, Lake, and Park. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) can be used to analyze the spatial and economic impact of STRs in Summit County. Total population, median household income and STR locations are analyzed in ArcGIS Pro. The goal is to highlight the impacts of STRs on local housing affordability, potentially encouraging stricter regulations including charging tourism or business tariffs or giving incentives for short-term renters to long-term rent instead
An Archaeological Exploration of Fatty\u27s Place and Its Contribution to Early Tourism in the Garden of the Gods
Get PDFIn the Garden of the Gods Park, east of Gateway Rocks, Edwin “Fatty” Rice owned and operated a business that sold curios and offered amenities to visiting tourists. Fatty’s Place was the only establishment of its kind to exist on the grounds of the park. However, not much recognition has been given to Rice’s contribution to tourism in the Garden. This thesis uses archaeological exploration, especially ground-penetrating radar, framed by place theory to shed light on Rice’s involvement in the advent of tourism within the park. By providing three narratives, Rice’s place as imagined, as remembered, and as built, the cultural influence left by Fatty’s place is explored. The initial narrative depicts the establishment as it was imagined by Rice himself. The second account shares how people remember Fatty’s place. Finally, the third narrative details the shop’s layout by incorporating historic plat diagrams, archival imagery, excavations, and GPR analysis to rebuild Rice’s compound
Colorado\u27s Multilingual Learners and the READ Act: A Critical Discourse Analysis
Get PDFThis dissertation critically examines the Colorado Reading to Ensure Academic Development Act (READ Act) through the lens of Critical Discourse Analysis, focusing on the discursive construction of the Act and its impact on educational opportunities for multilingual learners. The study explores the role of power and knowledge in shaping the READ Act and addresses the ideological tensions and power imbalances that arise from a policy primarily designed for monolingual, English-speaking students. Drawing on personal experiences and extensive research, this analysis highlights the shortcomings of a phonics-heavy approach mandated by the READ Act, particularly for multilingual learners who require a more comprehensive literacy instruction framework that includes oral language development, culturally relevant materials, and instruction in their home languages.
The findings reveal significant gaps in policy awareness and implementation, with policymakers often oblivious to the specific needs of multilingual learners. The study underscores the unintended consequences of well-meaning educational policies that, by neglecting the diverse needs of all students, perpetuate social injustices and inequalities. By analyzing the language and ideological underpinnings of the READ Act, this dissertation provides actionable recommendations aimed at creating more inclusive and equitable literacy instruction policies.
This research contributes to the broader discourse on educational policy, literacy instruction, and equity, offering insights for policymakers, educators, and researchers. It calls for a critical re-evaluation of policy language and implementation strategies to ensure that all students, regardless of language proficiency, can benefit from state literacy initiatives. Through this comprehensive analysis, the dissertation aims to inform better policy decisions that promote equity in reading instruction and ultimately improve educational outcomes for multilingual learners in Colorado and beyond
Inequality, Prenatal Stress, and Infant Negative Emotionality: Pregnancy as a Marker of Intergenerational Transmission
No full textThe Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) hypothesis suggests that pregnancy is a developmentally sensitive period during which environmental factors can have long term consequences for the pregnant individual and the fetus. This model regards pregnancy as a mechanism for the intergenerational transmission of health. The aim of the current dissertation is to identify sociocultural stressors that put pregnant individuals at risk and understand how stress-responsive hormones might impact infant emotional development after birth. The first study focuses on types of discrimination as sociocultural stressors and how they relate to markers of psychological and physiological stress among pregnant individuals. The second study focuses on a stress-responsive hormone released by the placenta, placental corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH), and tests whether changes in placental CRH over gestation predict infant negative emotionality. Results of the firs study show that interpersonal experiences of racial and ethnic discrimination are a risk factor for higher prenatal stress among Latinx pregnant individuals. However, birthplace of the pregnant individual moderates this result so that US-born individuals are at higher risk than foreign-born individuals. Moreover, second study finds that accelerated placental CRH trajectories are related to lower negative emotionality response among 6-month-old boys but not girls. These findings support the idea that pregnancy is a sensitive period that is prone to environmental inputs and may influence offspring development beyond birth. All findings from the two studies as well as contributions to extant literature, limitations, and future directions are discussed in detail
Designing Customized Loss Functions for Training Deep Neural Networks
Get PDFThis dissertation explores the critical role of loss functions in enhancing the predictive performance of deep machine learning models. Loss functions are an integral element of all the ongoing advances we witness daily in this domain. I design custom loss functions and their impacts on various machine learning tasks, particularly in computer vision.
In the first stage of my research, I aim to improve the prediction performance of deep learning models by providing them with more precise feedback associated with task requirements. This led me to create the concept of assistive loss functions. My first proposed loss function, inspired by the Active Shape Model (ASM), is ASM Loss, designed to improve the detection of facial landmarks and head pose accuracy in facial images. Additionally, influenced by Knowledge Distillation (KD), I introduce KD-Loss, a loss designed specifically for regression tasks, focusing on detecting facial landmarks.
Proceeding to the second phase of my research, I focus on regression problems. Building upon my prior work, I introduce Adaptive Coordinate-based Regression (ACR)-Loss, a context-aware loss function with face alignment implication. I provide a mechanism to dynamically measure how hard the localization of each landmark point is, and accordingly, ACR-Loss provides unique feedback to the model. Furthermore, I introduce Intensity-aware Categorical (IC)-Loss for detecting sagittal cervical spine landmark points in medical images. It effectively deploys characteristics from classification problems to enhance regression optimization. Both ACR-Loss and IC-Loss comprise contextual information, leading to a significant enhancement in localization precision.
In the third phase, I turned my attention toward classification problems within the domain of deep machine learning. I introduce Adaptive Correlation-based (Ad-corre) Loss, designed to enhance the discriminative capabilities of deep learning models, with a specific focus on improving classification accuracy in automatic facial expression recognition. Furthermore, I introduce Informative (Info) Loss, a specialized loss function developed for medical applications, specifically aimed at distinguishing between Mild Cognitive Impairment and Normal Cognition groups based on transcriptions of interviews conducted as part of the I-CONECT study.
Overall, I have proposed custom loss functions to improve the predictive performance in both regression and classification problems. Furthermore, I have introduced assistive loss functions, designed to enhance the performance of the main loss functions. The collective outcomes of this extensive exploration highlight the critical role of loss functions, adapting and optimizing them for various domains in deep machine learning. This research suggests and proposes a variety of methodologies for designing adaptive and context-aware loss functions within deep machine learning
An Examination of the International Baccalaureate’s Approaches to Learning as Humanizing
Get PDFThe development of 21st-century skill frameworks characterized as being universal, transferrable, and future-facing are ubiquitous among international educational organizations (Suto & Eccles, 2014). The International Baccalaureate (IB) incorporates a similarly articulated universal, transferrable, and future-facing set of skills called the Approaches to Learning (ATL) in its four programmes (International Baccalaureate, 2022b). However, critiques of the IB as being Eurocentric and solely concerned with the development of learners for Western educational experiences calls for a critical examination of the ATL as promoting monocultural skills which are not contextual, personalized, or humanizing (Refai, 2020). This multiple-case study and document review utilized the conceptual frameworks of Biesta’s (2022) subjectification domain of schooling and Salazar’s (2013) principles and practices, and tenets of a humanizing pedagogy to examine the humanizing aptitude of the organizational intention and educator operationalization of the ATL in the IB’s middle years programme.
The study’s findings indicate that there is a degree of an intention for the ATL to be humanizing from an organizational standpoint. However, there were findings that indicated that the guidance for teachers and schools suggested activities which were antithetical to the pursuit of humanization as conceptualized through Biesta’s (2022) dimension of subjectification. Participant interviews included MYP practitioners from all three regions of the International Baccalaureate, the Americas; Africa, Europe, and the Middle East (AEME); and Asia Pacific (AP). Findings from the interviews indicate that while MYP practitioners exhibit humanizing pedagogies in their operationalization of the ATL, it is unclear whether that operationalization is a result of the ATL. All practitioners agreed that the ATL are universally applicable and beneficial to all learners regardless of context
Striving Toward Racial Solidarity in a Culture of White Christianity: Multi-Race + Multi-Faith Organizing in Texas
No full textCritical Whiteness scholar George Yancy argues that the condition of whiteness is not natural, but rather, a social construct that can be de-constructed, and from which Whites (through great effort) can “un-suture” themselves. This un-suturing can only be achieved through deep interrogation of, and resistance to, the personal and social benefits of whiteness. While a growing amount of scholarship is focused on the problem of White Christian Nationalism, this dissertation argues that the problem of whiteness persists even among justice-seeking White Christians who engage in the work of organizing for racial justice, but often continue to center whiteness even as they understand it to be the core problem they are seeking to dismantle. A central claim is that while it may be impossible for White people to ever become wholly un-sutured from the condition of whiteness, the essential labor for Whites in reclaiming the human condition is a lifelong commitment to this practice of un-suturing from whiteness; and for White Christians, this must also include the work of un-suturing Christianity from whiteness, as it has been portrayed through the dominant U.S. national religious identity.
The project proposes that one potentially transformational way White Christians can engage in this un-suturing process is through multi-race and multi-faith organizing efforts for racial justice, which can lead to deep interrogations of whiteness and solidarity-building processes with people of various racial, economic, and religious identities. Examining the lived experiences of community organizers in Texas who are working toward incarceration and immigration reform and/or abolition, this study employs qualitative ethnography and Critical Whiteness Studies as frameworks for building a theo-ethical, praxis-centered analysis primarily based in womanist, Latin American feminist, and Indigenous scholarship. The purpose is twofold: to better understand how White Christians engage in and are impacted by organizing in multi-race and multi-faith movements for racial justice (do these movements have the potential to “un-suture” White Christians/Christianity from whiteness?); and to better understand how the presence of White Christians impacts the work of such organizations and movements (what are the benefits, as well as the costs, of allowing White Christians into power-building spaces/movements for BIPOC communities?)