"There" is Home: A Case Study of the Colored Orphan Asylum in New York City
Year of Dissertation:
2012
The General Report to the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection in 1933 stated that as a rule "public and private agencies for dependent children have not concerned themselves with the special problems of the Negro, Mexican, Puerto Rican and Indian...Differences in culture, tradition, language and other factors of race and nationality call for a special body of knowledge and specialized methods of meeting those needs that are common to all. Failure to understand this has resulted in the neglect of certain groups, and lack of the needed specialized care" (Folks & Murphy, 1933, 17). More than 75 years later, findings indicate that youth exciting foster care are still fairing poorly despite varied policy and practice initiatives; Black youth, who are disproportionately represented out of home placement, have poorer outcomes than other populations (Hilliard, 2011; Hook & Courtney, 2011; Naccarato, Megan & Courtney, 2010; Osgood, Foster & Courtney, 2010; Center for Urban Futures, 2011).
Making Music in Latino Charlotte: Politics and Community Formation in a Globalizing City
Year of Dissertation:
2012
"Making Music in Latino Charlotte: Politics and Community Formation in a Globalizing City" examines how Latina/o immigrant musicians and their audiences form local communities centered around music-making that link to hemispheric social networks and operate within the context of global flows of capital, labor, and cultural practices. Drawing on ethnographic data collected from 2008-2011, I place musical communities in the context of Charlotte's political economy and document how musicians and audiences create musical community. Residential segregation, class divisions, and tensions around race and ethnicity divide Charlotte's Latin music scene into three districts that loosely correspond to genre categories of regional mexicano, música tropical, and Latin rock. Musical genre distinguishes between different social groups within the Latino population, marking class, ethnic, linguistic, and status difference, but also facilitating collaboration between groups with common experiences. Working musicians labor in the vulnerable context of immigration crackdowns, low-paying, contingent jobs, and varied class-based views on training and professionalism. The study analyzes how musicians engage with politics in their music and personal lives, revealing a relative lack of overt political activism among working musicians, because of their multiple vulnerabilities. Yet, musicians carefully consider political questions through storytelling and meta-discourse about music, and, through the everyday act of making music, recognize themselves as a group having agency. Latino cultural festivals reveal how community organizations market latinidad, drawing musicians and their labor practices into debates about cultural production and consumption. Local musicians draw on the agency they form through making music in Charlotte to engage with the uneven terrain of the global Latin music industry. I analyze what Charlotte`s Latin music scene means for a conceptualization of the city as a center of music-making, for Southern literature, and for the future of Latino music in the US South.
The Circulation of Blackface: Nostalgia and Tradition in US Minstrel Performance of the Early 1920s
Year of Dissertation:
2010
The Circulation of Blackface:
Phantoms of Home Care and Victims of Designed Neglect: A Qualitative Study of Home Care Nurse and Social Worker Perceptions, Decisions, and Coping with Persons with Alzheimer's disease
Year of Dissertation:
2009
Abstract
Essays in Market Efficiency
Year of Dissertation:
2009
This dissertation investigates the market inefficiencies of both foreign exchange and equity markets. On the one hand, the efficiency of foreign exchange markets is explored through the measurement of the contribution to price discovery of the spot and futures market, and the its effect on intermarket mispricing. On the other hand, the efficiency of equity markets is tested by examining the martingale behavior of recently popular international stock index ETFs.
Exploration of Unknown Structured Environments with Multiple Robots
Author:
Flavio Cabrera-Mora
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Multi-robot systems are expected to perform faster than their single-robot counterpart in different areas of robotics such as exploration, localization and mapping. For exploration, a faster task completion is only one of the advantages of using multi-robot systems. Among other benefits are better reliability, increased robustness and improved efficiency. Coordination of the movement of the robots is required in order to attain those benefits.
ENVISIONED COMMUNITIES: AFRICAN AMERICAN LIFE AND THE MOVING PICTURES, 1896-1927
Year of Dissertation:
2013
This dissertation investigates the role of cinema in the modern black experience and the generative role that African Americans played in the creation of American modernity. Two questions animate this study. First, how did African Americans consolidate their institutions and social bonds amid the distending forces of turn-of-the-century migration? Second, how and why did cinema--as a location, medium, and set of practices--become so important to the collective articulation of black identity in the early twentieth century?
WHY WE SHOULD NOT BE UNHAPPY ABOUT HAPPINESS VIA ARISTOTLE
Year of Dissertation:
2009
The purpose of my dissertation is to resolve the ongoing argument in the modern Anglo-American interpretation of Aristotelianism regarding the principle of eudaimonia (happiness). Exlusivist interpretation argues that the principle of eudaimonia is one dominant or exclusive telos (end) consisting of the aretê (excellence or virtue) of the contemplation of the divine. Inclusivist interpretation argues that the principle of eudaimonia is an inclusive or compounded telos containing this and all other Aristote-lian virtues in a comprehensive or mixed life ruled by the practical wisdom. I offer the functionalist interpretation that goes beyond the dichotomy of inclusivism and exclusivism in arguing that (1) contrary to exclusivism, contemplation is functionally linked with all the other activities of the soul throughout the entire Aristotelian corpus and that (2) contrary to inclusivism, contemplation is functionally superior to each and all of the other activi-ties of the soul, making a compound model irrelevant in its incapacity to express the hier-archy within the soul.
NEURAL SUBSTRATES OF VISUAL PROCESSING AND OBJECT RECOGNITION DEFICITS IN SCHIZOPHRENIA
Year of Dissertation:
2012
Mounting evidence has shown that patients with schizophrenia have preferential deficits of the magnocellular versus the parvocellular visual system. Experiment 1 examined this deficit in schizophrenia patients utilizing an electrophysiological paradigm. Patients showed preferential magnocellular deficits in electrophysiological response indicative of impaired contrast gain (response amplification at low contrast) and contrast gain control (inhibition of responses at high contrast), which are used preferentially by this pathway to optimize responses. Patients also displayed deficits in psychophysical contrast sensitivity, further showing deficient contrast gain in the magnocellular pathway. These electrophysiological and psychophysical deficits were associated with neuropsychological and emotion processing deficits, which predicted functional outcome.
HOUSEHOLD DENSITY AND ACADEMIC STANDING AMONG COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS: THE EFFECTS OF TIME ORIENTATION AND SPATIAL SELF-REGULATION
Year of Dissertation:
2012
The purpose of the study was to develop a multifactorial model tracing paths from housing affordances to academic outcomes in higher education. The study sought to connect two areas of psychological research: on one side, the adverse effects of environmental stressors and inadequate self-regulation upon life course prospects and, on the other, the affective, behavioral, and cognitive elements of purposive self-regulation used by college students toward long-term goal attainment.