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Toward a Speculative Librarianship
No full text(Academic) citation is a representational practice of hollow, ruined potential professional accumulation of intellectual capital. Critical librarianship finds itself in the same situation as Saint Anthony: beset by interpretive demons (Freud, Nietzsche, Marx), nearing total evaluative exhaustion, wandering in a theoretical desert of its own creation. “Where am I?” the lonely figure shouts as he’s lifted into the air. Prayer, even as a last resort, seems intolerable. What happens when critique loses its way
Analyzing an AI Summary of an Executive Order
No full textThis assignment asks students to critically analyze the Executive Order on Incarceration in Private Prisons by producing an independent summary of its intent, purpose, and implementation, along with best-practice recommendations for improving its effectiveness. Students then use the Grammarly AI Summary Tool to generate an alternative summary and compare it with their own analysis. Through structured self-assessment and revision, students evaluate differences in interpretation, identify gaps or insights, and reflect on the strengths and limitations of AI-assisted analysis. The assignment emphasizes critical policy analysis, ethical use of AI tools, and student-centered judgment
An autoethnographic study of a technical services librarian’s teaching journey during the tenure track: “Define myself for myself to both survive and thrive”
No full textThis autoethnographic study explores the disorienting dilemma that a technical services librarian experienced while alternating between working behind the scenes to fulfill professional responsibilities and teaching in the library to meet organizational expectations as a faculty member. The analysis of personal data accumulated during the tenure track period reveals three themes: teaching as learning to become, teaching as learning to challenge the system, and teaching as learning to research. Reflection focuses on three themes interconnected by the concept and practice of mindful learning. With the acknowledgement of limitations, this autoethnography concludes it was the self-reflective lifelong learning mindset that helped this technical service librarian achieve professional emancipation. This autoethnography emphasizes that academic librarians, either in technical or public services, should arm themselves with the lifelong learning mindset to survive and thrive in the ever-changing academic libraries’ landscape
Development of an Adhesive Emulsion Hydrogel for Soft Tissue Reconstruction
No full textSoft tissue filling materials are most commonly associated with various aesthetic, cosmetic procedures, primarily using lightly cross-linked hyaluronic acid to fill wrinkles and give facial features a more youthful appearance. These natural materials are biocompatible but degrade over time while more persistent synthetic fillers may provoke a chronic inflammatory response. Migration from the injection site is also a key factor as this may not only render the implant non- functional but necessitate further procedures for removal of the foreign material. Such concerns are more pronounced for soft tissue reconstruction procedures (e.g., to treat congenital defects or traumatic injuries), which require implant longevity and retention at the injection site. The addition of an adhesive component to the material may reduce migration but this is complicated by the ubiquitous presence of water in a biological environment, which can both disrupt the chemistry of the adhesive as well as act as a physical barrier to the substrate. Hence, there is a need for a long-term, soft tissue bulking material that is able to achieve adhesion in a hydrated environment. Cellulose is the most abundant biopolymer on Earth and its derivatives have been approved by the FDA for use in a multitude of food, cosmetic, and biomedical products. Methylcellulose (MC), an amphiphilic cellulose derivative, may be methacrylated to produce injectable, redox-polymerized hydrogels that can form covalently bonded, long-lasting soft implants in situ. Carboxymethylcellulose can be oxidized via periodate treatment (oCMC) to impart adhesivity through the production of aldehyde functional groups, which form imine bonds with the primary amines of proteins via Schiff base reactions. These two polymers may be combined to engineer a semi-interpenetrating polymer network hydrogel (MoCMC) that is capable of adhesion to tissue, but the hydrophilic nature of carboxymethylcellulose, owed to its inherent anionic charge, leads to sequestration of water and a reduction in adhesive and mechanical strength. To combat these drawbacks, the MoCMC adhesive was reformulated with the addition of a calcium chloride solvent and natural plant-based oil to form an emulsion. The free calcium dications enable ionic crosslinking between carboxymethylcellulose chains, strengthening the semi-interpenetrating polymer network. The oil forms a multitude of micron-sized droplets interspersed throughout the gel network, emulsified by the methylcellulose, that serve to disperse moisture from the surface of the gel. The addition of both components was shown to restore the material’s adhesive strength lost in the presence of moisture and enhance its mechanical properties. The presence of the oxidized polymer was not found to be cytotoxic, however, the proliferation of human dermal fibroblasts was arrested in co-culture. Despite this, animal experiments revealed no adverse effects following subcutaneous injection in rodents over the course of 12 weeks. These experiments demonstrate that MoCMC is a safe, minimally invasive soft tissue filling material that may be appropriate for long-term use in vivo. The novel addition of oil in the form of an emulsion hydrogel further improves its adhesive properties, making it suitable for more demanding soft tissue reconstructive procedures
Sensing Prehistory: A Framework Reconciling Scientific Modeling and Human Experience Through Affordance Theory
No full textAt the core of the tension between scientific and humanistic approaches to archaeological knowledge production, epitomized by the processual movement and the post-processual critique of the late 20th century, is a disjuncture between abstract models and lived reality. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and phenomenology are interpretive approaches that reflect this broader tension. Here, I contend that more authoritative knowledge claims arise not from choosing amongst conflicting methods but by integrating the strengths of contrasting methods through the application of affordance theory as developed by James J. Gibson (1979) and initially applied to archaeology by Marcos Llobera (1996).
To substantiate this claim, I developed a framework integrating GIS and phenomenological techniques to evaluate four lines of inquiry—layout, movement, visibility, and hydrology—each essential for identifying what a landscape affords its inhabitants. I designed my dissertation to test and prove the value of this integration. As a test case, I applied the techniques to a case study of the Late Archaic Poverty Point site in Louisiana, which remains enigmatic despite more than a century of archaeological investigation. This case study demonstrated the robust results that arise when combining these disparate approaches.
I found that the layout of the earthworks at Poverty Point restructured movement, having implications for the distribution of goods and activities within the site; that visibility varied between the human- and landscape-scales, specifically as related to identifiability; and that the ridges, by their elevation above the swales and surrounding terrain, afforded dryer ground surfaces for dwellings and, more intriguingly, for movement, as they are more appealing movement corridors for people than the saturated soils of the adjacent swales.
My case study at Poverty Point demonstrates that GIS and phenomenological techniques provided contrasting and complementary insights—GIS offered an abstract landscape-scale perspective, while phenomenology captured the nuances of experience at the human-scale—that help to identify landscape affordances and enhance understanding of past human agency and actions. The approach developed in this dissertation offers a replicable framework for researchers aiming to rigorously investigate how affordances shaped the ways past peoples experienced and engaged with landscapes
Green Revitalization: Evaluating the Impact of Citywide Park Redesign and Renovation on the Health of Low-Income Communities in New York City
No full textBackground
The rapid pace of urbanization in the 21st century has profoundly reshaped global demographic patterns, with projections indicating that over two-thirds of the world’s population will reside in urban areas by 2050. This shift has also been associated with shifting population health risks, particularly concerning mental health stressors and physical inactivity, both of which are strongly linked to chronic conditions such as obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, anxiety, depression, and dementia. Globally, there is a need for large-scale, innovative built environment interventions in urban areas that address the behavioral and structural drivers of poor mental health and physical inactivity and ultimately reduce chronic disease burdens.
Urban parks and greenspaces are increasingly being recognized as vital public health infrastructure, as they may offer pathways for improved health and well-being through heat and air pollution mitigation, opportunities for social interaction and physical activity, and provision of restorative environments that can reduce stress. Park quality is thought to be an important factor, as parks that are perceived as well-maintained and safe are used more frequently and may create the conditions necessary for the health and social benefits of park use to emerge. Furthermore, growing evidence suggests that the dosage of park use also matters, where greater frequency and/or duration of park use may be associated with better health outcomes.
This dissertation sought to evaluate the public health impacts of the Community Parks Initiative (CPI), a major citywide policy effort in New York City (NYC) providing targeted infrastructure improvements to parks in low-income, densely populated communities with a history of disinvestment in public spaces. The overall objective was to evaluate the impact of CPI park quality improvements on longitudinal changes in behavioral and health outcomes among adult residents of low-income neighborhoods served by the parks using data from the Physical Activity and Redesigned Community Spaces (PARCS) study. Specifically, this dissertation research assessed the impact of CPI on three primary areas: neighborhood-level changes in park use patterns and park satisfaction (Chapter 2), individual-level changes in perceived stress (Chapter 3), and individual-level changes in physical activity and sedentary behavior (Chapter 4).
Methods
The PARCS study was a quasi-experimental prospective cohort study conducted between 2016 and 2022. A Difference-in-Differences (DID) analytical approach was used to estimate the causal effects of CPI renovations by comparing changes over time in health and behavioral outcomes between intervention and control groups. The sample included adult residents (aged ≥18 years) residing within a 0.3-mile radius of 31 intervention parks scheduled for CPI renovations and 21 sociodemographically matched control parks. Both intervention and control parks were located in low-income neighborhoods that met specific criteria related to poverty, density, recent population growth, and lack of prior capital investment. The CPI intervention involved comprehensive redesigns and renovations implemented by NYC Parks, with a median capital investment of U.S. $3.9 million per park site. The intervention improved overall park quality, amenities, aesthetics, and accessibility, and included substantial upgrades to greenery, seating areas, walking paths, ball courts, playgrounds, and adult fitness equipment.
Data collection occurred in two waves: pre- and post-renovation. Park use and park satisfaction outcomes were derived from repeated cross-sectional survey data (n = 1,220 unique residents), measuring self-reported past-month park use frequency, typical visit duration in minutes, and satisfaction with overall park quality and facilities. Perceived stress was measured longitudinally using the validated 14-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) (n = 313 participants), collected pre- and post-renovation. Physical activity and sedentary behavior measures were collected longitudinally using ActiGraph accelerometer devices worn for seven consecutive days pre- and post-renovation (n = 344 participants), yielding total volume of physical activity (vector magnitude per minute, or VMPM), and minutes/day of sedentary behavior, light physical activity, and moderate-vigorous physical activity. Linear generalized estimating equations and mixed-effects regression models were used to obtain DID estimates while accounting for correlations within park sites and individuals. Exploratory models examined three-way interactions involving intervention status, time, and park use patterns to assess whether the magnitude of health or behavioral change was dependent on the dose of exposure to the renovated park environment.
Results
The CPI park renovations led to significant neighborhood-level increases in park use duration and park satisfaction among residents living near renovated parks when compared to control neighborhoods. Specifically, the intervention led to a significantly larger increase in the usual length of time residents reported spending at the study park on weekdays [DID = 30.0 minutes (95% CI 10.3, 49.7)] and the total minutes spent at the park in the past month [DID = 466.3 minutes (95% CI 63.0, 869.6)]. Substantial increases were consistently reported across all park satisfaction metrics, with the largest improvements observed in satisfaction with overall park quality [DID = 38.4% (95% CI 25.2, 51.6)] and the maintenance of grounds and facilities [DID = 40.9% (95% CI 27.7, 54.1)].
In the assessment of individual-level health outcomes, CPI was not associated with an overall change in perceived stress in the full longitudinal sample [DID = 0.28 (95% CI -1.47, 2.03)]. However, a significant decrease in perceived stress attributable to the renovations was found for the divorced, separated, or widowed participant subgroup [DID = -4.22 (95% CI -7.92, -0.53)] and middle-aged participants (35-49y) with frequent park use (once/week or more) [DID = -4.46 (95% CI -8.28, -0.64)]. Furthermore, among intervention but not control participants, those with frequent park use (once/week or more) experienced a significantly larger decrease in perceived stress compared to those with infrequent park use (less than once/week) [difference in change = -2.92 (95% CI -5.36, -0.47)].
Similarly, the park renovations alone were not associated with overall changes in accelerometry-measured physical activity and sedentary behavior. Nonetheless, significant dose-response relationships between park use duration and changes in physical activity and sedentary behavior emerged exclusively within the renovated park neighborhoods, suggesting that longer typical visit durations to renovated parks were associated with increased physical activity and decreased sedentary behavior over time. Intervention participants who reported visiting their study park for 30 minutes or more on a weekend day experienced a 140.0-unit/day greater increase in VMPM (95% CI 52.7, 227.2) and a 61.1-minute/day larger decrease in sedentary time (95% CI -108.8, -13.3) compared to those with shorter visit durations. Furthermore, in the intervention group, each additional 60 minutes spent at a study park on weekdays was associated with 18.0 more minutes/day of light physical activity (95% CI 4.7, 31.3), and each additional 60 minutes spent at the study park on weekend days corresponded to 19.0 more minutes/day of light physical activity (95% CI 8.1, 29.9) and a 54.1-unit increase in average VMPM/day (95% CI 7.5, 100.7). No associations between park use duration and changes in physical activity or sedentary behavior were observed among residents living near control parks.
Conclusions
In one of the largest citywide park redesign and renovation projects to-date, CPI achieved considerable success in enhancing park perceptions and increasing the amount of time spent at parks among residents in low-income neighborhoods. However, physical renovations alone were not sufficient to drive widespread community-level improvements in physical activity or perceived stress. The primary and novel finding of this research is that high-quality, renovated park environments may serve as a necessary precondition for translating higher park use into measurable health benefits, including both stress reduction and physical activity improvements. This is supported by the consistent observation that the dose-response relationship between park use and health outcomes was only present among renovated park sites, indicating that the quality of the physical space may be essential prerequisite to the health-benefitting potential of park use. To maximize the public health return on investments in urban greenspaces, future built environment interventions should adopt multidimensional approaches that strategically couple infrastructure upgrades with community-tailored programming and social supports designed to promote the increased park use necessary to fully realize the health benefits of improved parks
Too Fast, Too Slow: Girlhood, Temporality, and Eugenics in Twentieth Century Film
No full text“Too Fast, Too Slow: Girlhood, Temporality, and Eugenics in Twentieth Century Film,” connects the eugenic legislation of the 1920s with the aesthetic discourses around the ideal female body in the developing film industry. Just as film was an emergent technology in the early twentieth century, eugenics was an emergent science. While eugenics became more and more publicly unspeakable throughout the thirties with the rise of Nazism abroad, the American preoccupation with race science and reproducing ideal white bodies never went away. Starting with silent films such as GW Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), which directly parallels the Supreme Court Case, Buck v. Bell, which legalized sterilization, I move from how film directly replicates or responds to then-contemporary eugenics towards how eugenic discourse would both haunt and shape female representation and film technology for decades to come. In the postwar period, in the moment between eugenics and genetics, film technology mediated an aesthetic vocabulary of the ideal white female body when words became suspect. The project also explores how sterilization legislation framed deviant female sexuality as a site of disability, as I use this category overlap to both argue that disability as a category is profoundly temporally situated, and that eugenics play an important role in the formation of American sexual cultures.
The first chapter begins in the 1920s by contrasting the visual and legal figuration of Carrie Buck and Deborah Kallikak, two real “too-fast, too-slow” girls immortalized by the violence of the American eugenics movement, with the silent G.W. Pabst film starring Louise Brooks, Diary of A Lost Girl. While Diary of A Lost Girl translates a story much like that of Carrie Buck faithfully, the thirties turned to exploring the salacious and queer possibilities of girls with voracious appetites for sex and low morals: the second chapter reads Kay Francis’s queer, rhotacism-inflected performance in the illness drama One Way Passage as a site of queer-crip performance strategy. The post-war forties, in which American eugenics became unspeakable, translated these difficult conversations into an aesthetic context: films like the technicolor melodrama Leave Her to Heaven explored how the perfect white female body is always constructed through violence. The fourth chapter explores this violence at a systemic level, arguing that wartime development in technology reconfigured the body as something to be mechanically or surgically changed – both literally in the surgical construction of Marilyn Monroe from Norma Jeane, and more metaphorically in the creation of CinemaScope. When we reach Jackie and Josephine and Guy, I argue that Susann’s life and work can be read as a process of sifting the “incurably” disabled from the curably disabled, and how those categories collapse under our attention.
Finally, I conclude with an analysis of disability in the films of Edie Sedgwick, a performer whose life paralleled the experience of Carrie Buck, both in her forced institutionalization and surgical abortions. Throughout these chapters, I remain interested in temporality and disability, as well as how eugenics creates a language of temporality that haunts how we configure disability today
Building Fugitive Communities Through Refusal
No full textThis dissertation project is an act of transgression against the settler colonial university through a deliberate disruption of its knowledge-production protocols and intellectual property relations. As it exists as a call to refuse the university and its underlying ethic of domination, this work theorizes refusal as an abolitionist praxis framed by decolonial and Indigenous theory, Black feminist thought, revolutionaries and political prisoners from the Black Radical Tradition, and personal-historical organizing, struggle, and activism at the City University of New York. Grounded in these traditions, the dissertation develops its core argument through a threefold structure: diagnosing the institutionalization of community, forging a methodological weapon of refusal, and enacting a generative fugitive practice. Chapter one, The Foundational Contradictions in the Learning Communities Movement in Higher Education, exposes the fundamental contradictions that emerge from the institutionalization of community through an analysis of the learning communities movement across historical, political and theoretical contexts. Chapter two, Methodology of Refusal: Refusing Research and its Ethic of Domination, argues that academic research and authorizing mechanisms like IRBs are tools of colonial governance. This chapter articulates a methodology of refusal; a strategic, political orientation grounded in revolutionary abolitionist praxis. Chapter three, Practices of Refusal: Refusing Learning Management and Proprietary Enclosure, rearticulates refusal not as mere negation, but as a generative, strategic reorientation to one’s role within the university. This work concludes that the transgressive act of refusing the settler colonial university requires building the fugitive communities necessary to dismantle its colonizing foundations and structures and to create the relational conditions for collective liberation
Build, Freeze, Expedite, Renew: Messages on Housing in the 2025 New York City Mayoral Campaign
No full textPolls of likely voters prior to New York City’s 2025 mayoral race suggested that proposing a persuasive solution to the city’s housing crisis was likely to be critical to the building of a winning electoral coalition. And an important factor in voters’ reception of each candidate’s housing proposals would be the role that housing developers are perceived to play in those solutions. Developers, who are widely regarded as unscrupulous profiteers in a local housing landscape where the deck is always already stacked against the renter or home buyer, figure (accurately or not) as the chief villain in the story many New York City voters tell themselves about the housing crisis. This tendency to blame developers has the potential to unite ideologically disparate voters, yet most candidates could not afford to rhetorically alienate developers, whom they were likely to need as campaign donors or as partners in housing development (including for affordable housing) once in office. Thus, mayoral candidates often choose not to attack developers directly in their housing plans and public statements; instead, a promise to build new housing at large scale has become a proxy for candidates’ developer-friendliness. Complicating the matter for candidates in 2025 was that a significant number of voters, particularly leftists and progressives, had come to equate what they derisively term a “build, baby, build” strategy with developer-friendliness. Therefore, the promise to build new housing – which became a component in every major mayoral candidate’s housing plan, to a greater or lesser degree – was a needle that candidates needed to thread with great caution, as it could alienate many left-of-center voters. In this thesis, formulated at the beginning of the mayoral race, I hypothesize that the candidate who successfully navigated the political pitfalls of the promise to build new housing – whether by rhetorically conflating “new housing” with “affordable housing” (as Brad Lander seemed to intend doing) or by creating ambiguity around the proportion of newly built housing that will be affordable (an approach that Zellnor Myrie, a progressive with mainstream aspirations, showcased in his housing plan) would have the best chance of forging a coalition of progressives and moderates that was large enough to carry him or her to electoral victory. This thesis tracks the builder-friendliness of candidates’ messaging on housing during the spring 2025 primary season, analyzes the political calculus that appeared to inform that messaging, and considers, in light of the results of the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary and November 4 election, the degree to which each candidate’s messaging was able to attract the coalition of voters he or she hoped for