-
Prospective Students
-
Faculty and Staff
-
Current Students
-
Alumni and Friends
ABSTRACT
HERU RYAN BENSON FEEMSTER: Pan-Africanism in Establishing Culturally Affirming Racialized Gendered Identities in African American Cis-gendered Heterosexual Males attending Counselor Education Doctoral Programs with Respect to Archetypal Imagery and Ancestral Assistance
Academic literature suggests that institutions of higher learning can oftentimes embody the systemic racist attitudes of the collective society resulting in African American males experiencing challenges in completing their doctoral degree because of 1.) Spending more time and energy wondering if they are being accepted or tolerated; 2.) Discerning if the words, actions, and intentions of white people are supportive or destructive, and 3.) Contemplating different methods to resist oppression as opposed to accommodating to it (Smith et al., 2011; Pierce, 1988). These concerns are prevalent in counselor education and supervision degree programs. The purpose of this dissertation research study is to determine the role of Pan African epistemology and ontology in the development of African American male doctoral student’s culturally affirming identity development in counselor education and supervision programs. This dissertation research study is significant because it can assist with providing counselor education and supervision doctoral programs in understanding the minoritized culture’s view upon social reality and how they experience their social conditions. The following three research questions guided the study: 1.) How do African American male doctoral students in counselor education and supervision programs subjective interpretations of the images relate to the African archetypal meanings? 2.) How do African American male doctoral students in counselor education and supervision programs make sense of their racialized gendered identity with respect to culturally affirming African images; 3.) In what ways can Pan-African epistemology inform counselor education and supervision programs to enhance African American male inclusion? This dissertation research study employed a visual methodology of photo elicitation. Photo Elicitation is a qualitative methodology using photographs as prompts for rich discussion about the research topic. There were three findings: 1) African American males experience ancestral assistance to reconcile the cognitive dissonance experienced between the identity racialized and gendered by European supremacy and the identity captured by a Pan-African paradigm; 2.) African American male exposure to culturally affirming images increased connection to ancestral guidance that encouraged visibility, inclusion, sense of belonging and acceptance of their racialized gendered identities; and 3.) The execution of multiculturalism, social justice advocacy, and racial equity and inclusion programs are seen as a rhetorical ethic that attempts to disarm African American males into the belief that the fullness of their racialized gendered identities is acceptable within counselor education programs. An implication to the field of counselor education is to incorporate Pan-African programming within the core curriculum and as specialty areas that include art, religion, music, communications, literature, popular culture, history, anthropology, education, sociology, and political science of the Pan-African world.
The coal-fired steam electricity plants are interested in finding efficient ways to manage by-products from the combustion process out of environmental and regulatory considerations. As one of the major solid by-products, the coal fly ash (CFA) is required by the Coal Combustion Residuals (CCRs) rules to be disposed of in an engineered landfill to protect groundwater. While the disposal of the CFA in the landfill needs water for moisture conditioning and dust control measures, it is convenient to use liquid by-products as alternative moisture sources. The concentrates (brines) generated from the volume reduction of the flue gas desulfurization (FGD) wastewater, such as reverses osmosis and evaporation treatment, can be an alternative liquid source to achieve zero-liquid-discharge (ZLD) for its economic benefit and environmental responsibility considerations. It is reasonable to investigate the potential methods to co-dispose the CFA and FGD brine in the ash landfill. In this study, chloride was the dominant anion with a significant presence of sulfate and bromide in the hypersaline FGD brine, and the cations were mainly calcium and magnesium. The class F CFA used in this study was acquired from an electric plant in the southeast U.S. and did not possess cementitious properties needed for stabilization/solidification (S/S) of co-disposal material. Methods investigated were the co-disposal through compaction and paste encapsulation technology. Instrumented testbeds with leachate and runoff collection systems for each co-disposal method were used to study their field behaviors under the weather conditions of Charlotte, North Carolina.
The chemical analysis of leachate and runoff samples from the compacted testbed found that the method released 79.1% of chloride and 88.6% of bromide in added FGD brine due to the absence of solidification/stabilization of the material. While the electrical conductivity (EC) was used as an indicator of the pore solution’s salinity, the chemical compositions of the fluid could vary as observed in the shifting of dominant anion from chloride to sulfate in the leachate. This study established a set of empirical equations to translate the permittivity to volumetric water content (VWC) for the pore solution's of a known EC (salinity). The low intensity, high-frequency precipitation provided high infiltration during the winter, resulting leachate generation by the testbed with a little amount of runoff. In contrast, the summer's high intensity, low-frequency rains resulted in a high runoff with little infiltration, coupled with extensive evaporation, causing a pause in leachate generation.
Compared to the compacted method, the paste encapsulation method successfully sequestered the halides mainly through the solidification process of the material, as indicated by the leaching test. Further analysis of the chemical composition of inner and annulus leachate coupled with the low hydraulic conductivity (1.44×10-8) of parallelly tested laboratory samples and the negligible leachate volume collected from the inner section of the leachate collection system suggests the leachate collected in the annulus section originated from side leakage. The chemical analysis of leachate and runoff showed on average 80% of retention of chloride and bromide during the experiment period and 97% retention if the side leakage could have been eliminated. The relatively impermeable paste suggests storm management of a paste landfill should expect runoff quantity approximately equivalent to the local precipitation. The surface temperature of the paste was elevated by solar radiation during the summer, which indicated the paste landfill could serve as a heat source that could impact the local microclimate. The mineralogy study of different samples showed the formation of poorly structured minerals which caused interpretation challenges of XRD results. The anticipated halide stabilization pathway through the precipitation of Fridel’s salt and Kuzel’s salt was complicated by the significant presence of magnesium in the brine.
Although the compacted method failed to retain halides under current weather conditions (Charlotte, NC, US), it does not necessarily disqualify its use in different environments. Therefore, a physics-based COMSOL-MATLAB (CM) model was established to simulate the field behaviors of the compacted co-disposal material, which was validated with the field data. The CM model consisted of three main components: heat transfer (HT), unsaturated flow (UF), and solute transport (ST) processes. The model also simulated the runoff, evaporation, and solar heating at the surface of the testbed. The CM model could appropriately reproduce the field leachate/runoff generation pattern, moisture content variation, temperature profile, and the change of chloride and bromide concentrations in the leachate during the washoff stage. The accuracy of simulation results could be improved with a better estimation of the conditions on the testbed surface.
While the validated physics-based model could be used to explore potential management methods for the compacted landfill and its behaviors under different weather conditions, the abundance of data spurred the interest in developing data-driven models. Since the bulk dielectric permittivity, which could be translated into VWC, was the measured property, a data-driven model simulating the change of permittivity in the compacted testbed was developed. The data-driven model was structured as three layers of material stacked in spatial order to address the standard operation of implementing new layers on top of old materials during landfill operation. With a forecast interval of 24 hours, the prediction over time of three years had an average R2 of 97.6% with the data-driven model trained with the first-year data, and R2 of 99.5% if two years of data were used in the training. The scenario studies showed that the data-driven model could only accurately predict permittivity values included in the training dataset, which indicates that a failure to predict could happen when unprecedented values occurred. Further investigation showed the data-driven model could simulate processes that would have conventionally required additional physics-related information through unique pattern recognition in the training dataset.
The primary goal of design is to provide effective and innovative solutions for solving design problems. Ideation, an initial idea generation for conceptualizing a design solution, is a key step that can lead design to an innovative design solution in the design process. Idea generation is a process that allows designers to explore many different areas of the design solution space. Due to the importance of ideation, many studies focused on understanding the cognitive processes in idea generation and evaluating ideation. This thesis focuses on the idea generation process based on conceptual similarity in a human-AI collaboration. Co-creative systems in design allow users to collaborate with an AI agent on open-ended creative tasks in the design process. Co-creative systems share the characteristics of both creativity support tools helping users achieve creative goals and algorithms that generate creative content autonomously. Co-creative systems support design creativity by encouraging the exploration of design solutions in the initial idea generation. However, there is a lack of studies about the effect of co-creative systems on the cognitive process during ideation. This thesis posits that the contribution of an AI partner in design is associated with specific properties of ideation such as novelty, variety, quality, and quantity of ideas.
This thesis presents a co-creative system that enhances design creativity in the initial idea generation process. The Collaborative Ideation Partner (CIP) is a co-creative design system that selects and presents inspirational images based on their conceptual similarity to the design task while the designer is sketching. This thesis addresses how the conceptual similarity of the contribution of the AI partner influences design ideation in a co-creative system. This thesis presents an experiment with a control condition in which the images are selected randomly from a curated database for inspiration and a treatment condition in which conceptual similarity is the basis for selecting the next inspiring image. To evaluate the ideation during the use of CIP, this thesis employed an aggregate analysis and a temporal analysis. The findings show that the AI model of conceptual similarity used in the treatment condition has a significant effect on the novelty, variety, and quantity of ideas during human design ideation.
Smart homes are more connected than ever before, with a variety of commercial internet of things devices available. The use of these devices introduces new security and privacy risks in the home and needs for helping users to understand and mitigate those risks by providing them some level of control over their data. For doing so, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of smart home users' security and privacy perceptions, behaviors, preferences, and needs.
My thesis aims to investigate the current state of end-user knowledge of smart home device data practices, available privacy controls, and their security and privacy concerns and behaviors. I have utilized different research methods throughout this exploration, including semi-structured interviews, surveys, and experience sampling studies. The contributions of this dissertation are: 1) it uncovers several factors that contribute to the privacy perceptions, concerns, and behaviors of smart home users, 2) it provides in-depth analysis of the current interface support (or lack thereof) to address end-user privacy needs, and finally 3) it contributes several design guidelines to empower users with their privacy in the smart home.
Due to its reduced dimensionality, monolayer molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) exhibits many unique optical properties, making it an excellent candidate for future optoelectronic devices. Given the multitude of applications, understanding the optical limitations of MoS2 under intense excitation is essential to optimize its performance. To that end, we investigate the femtosecond laser-induced breakdown of monolayer MoS2 with a variety of techniques. In this study, the substrate is discovered to have a profound effect where the ablation threshold itself can vary by more than one order of magnitude due to a simple interference phenomenon within the monolayer. Via substrate engineering, the ablation threshold can be reduced such that laser patterning using pulse energies less than 100 pJ is possible. Similar to many other optical nonlinearities, absorption measurements and theoretical modeling reveal that avalanche ionization is also enhanced where more than 75% of the generated free carriers at breakdown are due to avalanche ionization alone. Finally, multi-shot studies demonstrate that MoS2 is one of the most optically robust materials with very weak incubation effects. Notably, the onset of optical damage results in the formation of nano-voids where clusters of atoms are removed while the overall integrity of the monolayer remains intact. All these findings help establish MoS2 as a promising candidate for strong field devices and provides foundational knowledge regarding the strong field physics of two-dimensional materials.
New modes of public transportation such as micromobility are rapidly growing in urban areas. Bike sharing and e-scooter sharing, for example, have been advanced to solve the first/last mile problem, providing quick access to bus stops and train stations for their users. This efficiency, however, may come at the cost of transmitting disease since the surfaces on the bicycles or scooters are subject to germs and harmful pathogens when they are left in contaminated places or used by infectious individuals. This dissertation aims to understand various facets of the role of micromobility transportation in the spread of viral disease within dense urban areas. I propose a novel micro-level and spatially-explicit agent-based modeling framework to model the spread of viral infectious diseases through micromobility systems and a baseline population. I use this simulation framework to study the role of micromobility in the spread of viral disease in urban areas by breaking down the problem into three directions. First, I want to study how surfaces on the new micromobility transportation systems contribute to the emergence and dynamics of viral epidemics in urban areas. Second, I seek to find out how geographic space and time are organized concerning the risk of exposure to a viral disease out of using micromobility vehicles. Third, to inform decision-making in response to the spread of viral disease through micromobility systems, I examine what intervention methods and strategies, including random or systematic intervention, are more effective in controlling the spread of infectious diseases through micromobility vehicles. In order to test the proposed model, a case study is conducted in Cook County, Illinois, and uses the Chicago City public bikesharing system. Results show that the emergence of viral disease through micromobility transportation in Cook County is possible, but the overall impact of the system on the disease dynamics in a worst-case scenario, especially with the current size of the system, is rather small. The proposed model, however, provides a better measure to evaluate the role of transportation in spread of disease compared to existing measures. The spatial pattern for the risk of exposure is higher in the central business district and in northern regions, where most of the shared bike transportation occurs. Moreover, the start day of exposure impacts the dynamics of the spread of disease through both micromobility and the baseline population. Finally, intervention success in a full-blown epidemic highly depends on human behavior, availability of disinfection equipment, and strategies to implement control methods. The proposed simulation framework can be used to assess the efficacy of interventions and make trade-offs between these factors when dealing with epidemics of the sort analyzed in this research.
Expectations regarding leadership practices are changing and evolving as the expectations for school leaders and, thus, central office leaders, to lead and support the creation of equitable outcomes for all students. School systems are recognizing methods to acquire and strengthen a critical lens for identifying the inequities within their school systems so that they can tackle barriers to advancement and root causes more directly (Cheatham et al., 2020). Central office leaders should exemplify specific critical roles for school reform (Rorrer et al., 2008). For this phenomenological study, six equity officers from five urban districts were interviewed about their perceptions of how they define equity-driven central office leadership and their perception of the skills needed for central office leaders to actualize their definition of equity-driven central office leadership and to also reflect upon their roles as equity officers. Districts may benefit from learning more about the practical core skills, behaviors, and comprehensive leadership development practices to develop equity-driven central office leaders who impact equitable outcomes for students. The findings indicate that when equity officers have support from the district, including time, financial resources, and access to school leaders, they believe they can have a more significant impact on schools and leaders.
Subjective perceptions of social mobility are critical for defending societal system and maintain political stability (Day and Fiske 2017; Houle 2019). This dissertation enhances our understanding of factors that shape beliefs in opportunity for upward mobility by focusing on the living environments in American neighborhoods. Inspired by the research from psychology and development economics, I developed and tested the Opportunity Beliefs Theory to explain how the built environment in neighborhoods affects individuals’ opportunity beliefs. The theory aims to elucidate how environmental factors psychologically affect people’s beliefs and behavior. The Opportunity Beliefs theory argues that the living environment can rouse positive or negative emotions. These emotional incentives shape residents’ self-efficacy. These emotions and self-efficacy largely affect people’s expectations for the future. According to the Opportunity Beliefs Theory, for people with low/middle income, those who live in a neighborhood with a better-maintained built environment are more likely to possess positive emotions and hold a high-level of self-efficacy. Furthermore, these residents will perceive more opportunities for themselves and their children for getting ahead in life, and they are more likely to agree that the opportunities are distributed equally in the society.
I have designed three studies which can support each other to explore the valid causal inferences between the built environment in neighborhoods and opportunity beliefs. First, In order to understand how the built environment in neighborhoods affects Americans’ opportunity beliefs, I designed a conventional survey which can obtain samples nation-wide and has high external validity. Next, I conducted two-round survey experiments to explore the causal inference. The results support my hypotheses.
This dissertation explores the interaction between the living environment and human psychological states and enriches the knowledge of emotions, self-efficacy, and opportunity beliefs. This research has important implications for poverty reduction and redistributive policy.
The task of visually tracking multiple objects remains an active field of algorithm development even after several decades of research in the computer vision community. It remains an active research area because identifying and maintaining the location of multiple targets in a video recording can be approached from several perspectives. Another reason is simply that the general problem of automated tracking can be very challenging. Challenges within visual tracking collectively manifest into three broader design decisions often faced by multiple object tracking (MOT) algorithms. First is how to handle what one could think of as "easy" and "hard" regions of a trajectory. The second is how to handle the sheer number of possible explanations of the data. The third is how do you model certainty. This dissertation aims to better model the uncertainty among possible answers to the tracking data in offline tracking scenarios. Furthermore, the method does so in a way that utilizes the information within the "hard to track" regions — information that is typically not used. The way we do this results in accurate tracking that is better suited for video analysis pipelines that may need to filter or correct any tracking errors.
Gentrification research almost exclusively focuses on traditional postindustrial cities. Despite a growing number of scholars emphasizing the importance of understanding gentrification outside of traditional urban areas, its presence and modalities in mid-sized cities remains underexplored. This holds particularly true in the U.S. South where unique historical processes of industrialization, segregation, and immigration form low-density spatial patterns of urbanization that set Southern cities apart from other U.S. regions. A group of rapidly emerging mid-size U.S. Sunbelt cities – known as the New South – share concerns over a number of converging and interrelated trends: urban core revitalization, rising housing costs, lagging economic mobility, investing in public infrastructure, and shifting demographics. In this context, the New South is an ideal region for investigating longitudinal neighborhood development trends within a gentrification framework. Using a case study approach in Charlotte, my dissertation explores the spatial, temporal, and spatial-temporal aspects of contemporary gentrification. A survival analysis also tests the relationships between gentrification and changes in housing renovation, urban amenities, proximity to light rail development, and other factors. Results reveal that administrative data at the parcel level is more precise at pinpointing where gentrification occurs and how it diffuses overtime. Findings also identify substantial differences between area estimates of gentrification hot spots calculated from parcel data, demonstrating that spatial aggregation error may lead to significant errors in measuring gentrification. Findings suggest that aggregating data to census blocks or tax parcel spatial unit provide more precise measurements of gentrification. Key findings from the survival analysis identify that neighborhood parks and greenways increase the likelihood of gentrification. Results also highlight a strong spatial effect, demonstrating that neighborhood effects do influence spatial patterns of gentrification. Unexpectedly, light rail variables do not increase the likelihood of gentrification. Additional variables that increase the likelihood of gentrification include parcels with older homes, parcels in and around historical areas, lower home values per square foot, proximity to quality education, proximity to highways, and proximity to commercial areas increase the likelihood of gentrification. Thus, at a time when urban areas are rapidly changing and considering how to accommodate future growth, a local level understanding of gentrification aids policy makers and community organizers to tailor more effective public policy.
