“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” is the name for one of French artist Paul Gauguin’s most influential paintings. Unsurprisingly, these very questions have occupied the minds of countless philosophers, artists, and scholars since the beginning of human civilization. These questions become especially salient...
This dissertation is a case study of one midwestern city and its Latinx inhabitants. It explores the intertwined pursuit by ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans of inclusion in union and electoral politics. The world of machine politics offered ethnic Mexicans and Puerto Ricans an avenue for inclusion. Central to this...
X-ray imaging at nano and micro-scale is of great importance for the material science and defense industry. Large penetration depth and low wavelength of x-rays offer an important potential to image objects at high resolution and in a non-invasive process. While the ever-growing community is pursuing novel applications and looking...
Existing scholarship documents the low levels of political power held by the American poor, and concomitant economic elite domination of Congress. Since the poor seldom elect lawmakers that share their descriptive traits, they necessarily rely on non-poor lawmakers virtually representing their interests. A key part of this virtual representation is...
Stress, trauma exposure, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are associated with chronic health conditions. In the U.S., women of color face trauma at up to four times the national rate. They also contend with chronic stress from the intersectional hardships of racism, discrimination, sexism, and economic hardship that is the...
Individuals experience a wide variety of emotions in their everyday lives. Some experience more variety, or complexity, than others, called emotional complexity. There is a body of research that suggests that emotional complexity is beneficial for mental and physical health; yet more recent work has called these associations into...
My dissertation defends a hermeneutic conception of ideology and its critique that situates both in the world-disclosing function of language.I argue that we must conceive of ideologies as world-disclosing embodied interpretive schemas insofar as they guide our cognitive, affective, and conative access to reality by providing the background knowledge, meanings,...
This dissertation examines the remediation of video game music from their source games to the concert hall. I argue that while not unique in their repositioning from popular to classical registers, the classicalization of video game music offers a contemporary challenge to the current norms of classical music institutions. I...
Pattern formation of biological structures involves the arrangement of different types of cells in an ordered spatial configuration. Patterning is thought to involve the spatial organization of molecular pre-patterns that precede and drive subsequent cell differentiation and coinciding morphogenesis. These molecular prepatterns are often, although not exclusively, organized through Turing...
Visual Question Answering (VQA) increasingly attracts industry and academia attention. It requires the model to provide a natural language answer by an image and a related natural language question. Meanwhile, it relates to multidisciplinary research such as natural language understanding, visual information retrieval, and multimodal reasoning. As a multimodality task,...