This dissertation examined the everyday use of different media including traditional and online U.S. and Korean media in building and maintaining identity of Korean married immigrant women. Online survey and interviews revealed that some aspects of my participants' media consumption habits and their relationship to acceptance to American culture and affinity for Korean identity are explained well with the new assimilation theory. Korean married immigrant women with U.S. citizenship, high income and education level were more likely to accept American cultural values. Furthermore, Korean immigrant women were more likely to be married to a Korean spouse. On the other hand, interviews revealed that immigrants with low socioeconomic status may prefer (or have no choice but) not to assimilate fully into the middle-class White society.

This thesis presents the use of data assimilation with optimal interpolation (OI) to develop atmospheric aerosol concentration estimates for the United States at high spatial and temporal resolutions. Concentration estimates are highly desirable for a wide range of applications, including visibility, climate, and human health. OI is a viable data assimilation method that can be used to improve Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) model fine particulate matter (PM2.5) estimates. PM2.5 is the mass of solid and liquid particles with diameters less than or equal to 2.5 μm suspended in the gas phase. OI was employed by combining model estimates with satellite and surface measurements. The satellite data assimilation combined 36 x 36 km aerosol concentrations from CMAQ with aerosol optical depth (AOD) measured by MODIS and AERONET over the continental United States for 2002. Posterior model concentrations generated by the OI algorithm were compared with surface PM2.5 measurements to evaluate a number of possible data assimilation parameters, including model error, observation error, and temporal averaging assumptions. Evaluation was conducted separately for six geographic U.S. regions in 2002. Variability in model error and MODIS biases limited the effectiveness of a single data assimilation system for the entire continental domain. The best combinations of four settings and three averaging schemes led to a domain-averaged improvement in fractional error from 1.2 to 0.97 and from 0.99 to 0.89 at respective IMPROVE and STN monitoring sites. For 38% of OI results, MODIS OI degraded the forward model skill due to biases and outliers in MODIS AOD. Surface data assimilation combined 36 × 36 km aerosol concentrations from the CMAQ model with surface PM2.5 measurements over the continental United States for 2002. The model error covariance matrix was constructed by using the observational method. The observation error covariance matrix included site representation that scaled the observation error by land use (i.e. urban or rural locations). In theory, urban locations should have less effect on surrounding areas than rural sites, which can be controlled using site representation error. The annual evaluations showed substantial improvements in model performance with increases in the correlation coefficient from 0.36 (prior) to 0.76 (posterior), and decreases in the fractional error from 0.43 (prior) to 0.15 (posterior). In addition, the normalized mean error decreased from 0.36 (prior) to 0.13 (posterior), and the RMSE decreased from 5.39 μg m-3 (prior) to 2.32 μg m-3 (posterior). OI decreased model bias for both large spatial areas and point locations, and could be extended to more advanced data assimilation methods. The current work will be applied to a five year (2000-2004) CMAQ simulation aimed at improving aerosol model estimates. The posterior model concentrations will be used to inform exposure studies over the U.S. that relate aerosol exposure to mortality and morbidity rates. Future improvements for the OI techniques used in the current study will include combining both surface and satellite data to improve posterior model estimates. Satellite data have high spatial and temporal resolutions in comparison to surface measurements, which are scarce but more accurate than model estimates. The satellite data are subject to noise affected by location and season of retrieval. The implementation of OI to combine satellite and surface data sets has the potential to improve posterior model estimates for locations that have no direct measurements.

A fictional retelling of the story of the woman warrior Mulan, set in China's Northern Wei Dynasty (386-536 CE), with focus on themes of personal identity, Sinicization, and cultural merging.

This thesis explores the potential of bilingual education for the future of American (U.S.) democratic society. It places an assessment of bilingualism in the larger history of the relationship between education and a vision of American democracy. The research focuses on the importance of being multilingual for a democratic society, and argues why bilingual education should be made available to students during the elementary years of their education. This study analyzes the state of California’s educational policies and concludes that viewing bilingual education through assimilationist lenses hinders students’ character and professional opportunity. It promotes acculturation and accommodation without assimilation as a strategy for approaching the incorporation of bilingual educational programs into public schools across the United States.

The Volga Germans assert a particular ethnic identity to articulate their complex history as a multinational community even in the absence of traditional practices in language, religious piety, and communal lifestyle. Across multiple migrations and settlements from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the Volga Germans' self-constructed group identity served historically as a tool with which to navigate uncertain politics of belonging. As subjects of imperial Russia's eighteenth-century colonization project the Volga Germans held a privileged legal status in accordance with their settlement in the Volga River region, but their subsequent loss of privileges under the reorganization and Russification of the modern Russian state in the nineteenth century compelled members of the group to immigrate to the Midwest in the United States where their distinct identity took its full form. The Volga Germans' arrival on the Great Plains coincided with an era of mass global migration from 1846 to 1940, yet the conventional categories of immigrant identity that subsumed Volga Germans in archival records did not impede their drive for community preservation under a new unifying German-Russian identity. A contingent of Midwest Volga Germans migrated in 1881 to Albina, a railroad town across the Willamette River from Portland, Oregon where the pressures of assimilation ultimately disintegrated traditional ways of life--yet the community impulse to articulate its identity remained. Thus, while Germans are the single largest ethnic group in the U.S. today numbering forty-two million individuals, Portland's Volga German community nevertheless continues to distinguish itself ethnically through its nostalgia for a unique past.

The roles of phonetics (e.g., Jun 1995, Holt 1997, Steriade 2001) and Articulatory Phonology (AP, Browman and Goldstein 1986, et seq.) in both the diachronic evolution of and synchronic analyses for phonological processes are relatively recent incorporations into Optimality Theory (OT) (Prince and Smolensky 1993/2004, McCarthy and Prince 1993/2001). I continue this line of inquiry by offering an AP-based OT proposal of three fricative-vowel assimilations in Latin American Spanish: /f/>[x] velarization (fui [xui] "I went"), /f/>[phi] bilabialization (fumo "I smoke") and /x/>[ç] palatalization (gente [çente] "people"). In this dissertation, I pursue three main objectives: to update and clarify via empirical study and spectral analysis the available data; to account for the crosslinguistically recurrent phonological patterns that affect fricative-vowel sequences; and to explain the above processes' genesis and diffusion in Latin American Spanish by integrating the first two goals into an Optimality Theoretic framework. Concerning the first task, data for the three processes are culled primarily from sociolinguistic corpora (Perissinotto 1975, Resnick 1975, Sanicky 1988, inter alia). Lacking from these accounts are detailed phonetic analyses. To fill this gap, I report on a four-part perception and production study designed to update the descriptive facts and provide spectral analyses for the allophonic variants. Regarding the second goal, I show that fricatives are susceptible to regressive consonant-vowel assimilation given the recurrence of assimilatory patterns nearly identical to the Spanish processes under investigation in disparate languages throughout the world. I argue that articulatory and acoustic facts conspire to render place features in (non-sibilant) fricatives difficult to recover given the vast interspeaker, intraspeaker and crosslinguistic variability in production (e.g., Ladefoged and Maddieson 1996) and the greater reliance on fricative-vowel transitional cues as opposed to cues internal to the frication on the part of the hearer (e.g., Manrique and Massone 1981, Feijóo and Fernández 2003). To that end, I argue that the sound changes originate(d) with the hearer's misperception of a speaker's extremely coarticulated target (Baker, Archangeli and Mielke 2011, inter alia). The dissertation concludes with a proposal adapting Jun (1995) that encodes the above articulatory and acoustic facts into an AP-based, typologically-minded OT approach that accounts both diachronically and synchronically for /f/ velarization, /f/ bilabialization and /x/ palatalization in Spanish (updating previous analyses by Lipski 1995 and Mazzaro 2005, 2011).

Access to consumer credit as a means of building wealth is one of the least examined forms of social inequality. The recent economic crisis in the United States has brought attention to the significance of consumer credit in our nation's economy; however, less understood are the specific obstacles and barriers that prevent low-income individuals from reaching the "American Dream." In an exploratory manner, this study compared credit access, credit literacy, and credit experience of low-income Latinos and non-Latinos to understand how credit might translate into asset-building and home ownership for Latinos, particular for those in new immigrant destinations where access to ethnic resources is limited. Using survey data on banking practices, credit accounts, and asset ownership gathered from English- and Spanish-speaking residents in northern Utah between 2007 and 2009, this research found that low-income Latino residents are not in the same position to establish credit compared to their low-income non-Latino neighbors. As expected, Latinos in my study have less actively sought credit cards, auto loans, and other forms of debt than non-Latinos. As a consequence their credit literacy and experience is limited. Half of the Latinos in this study are not financially embedded and operate mainly outside the credit economy. Surprisingly, this study revealed that having a bank account does not necessarily change one's financial behavior; in contrast to their native-born neighbors, even Latinos with bank accounts habitually paid bills with cash and/or money orders. Lacking access to and an understanding of credit remains a critical problem for most Latino immigrants, and unless changed such practices are likely to affect their wealth-building potential for years to come. Ironically, choices to remain outside of the credit economy may have spared many immigrants from the kind of financial losses suffered by "financially embedded" individuals during the recent recession. Credit can enable families to purchase assets such as a home that enable them to accumulate wealth. On the other hand, problems with credit can lead to overspending, reliance on credit, bankruptcy, and foreclosure. More research is needed to understand the dynamics of credit and inequality for both Latinos and non-Latinos alike.

The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC) provides forecasts of streamflow for purposes such as flood warning and water supply. Much of the water in these basins comes from spring snowmelt, and the forecasters at CBRFC currently employ a suite of models that include a temperature-index snowmelt model. While the temperature-index snowmelt model works well for weather and land cover conditions that do not deviate from those historically observed, the changing climate and alterations in land use necessitate the use of models that do not depend on calibrations based on past data. This dissertation reports work done to overcome these limitations through using a snowmelt model based on physically invariant principles that depends less on calibration and can directly accommodate weather and land use changes. The first part of the work developed an ability to update the conditions represented in the model based on observations, a process referred to as data assimilation, and evaluated resulting improvements to the snowmelt driven streamflow forecasts. The second part of the research was the development of web services that enable automated and efficient access to and processing of input data to the hydrological models as well as parallel processing methods that speed up model executions. These tasks enable the more detailed models and data assimilation methods to be more efficiently used for streamflow forecasts.

This dissertation evaluates veteran participation in the martial art of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) as a tool of reassimilation for veterans suffering from anxiety, stress and/or combat PTSD associated with military deployment. From the onset of Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation New Dawn, challenges associated with U.S. Veteran assimilation and reintegration have been increasing. Coping with long term displacement, trauma, loss, and making sense of identity shifts between being an active duty service member and civilian can often present challenges when navigating back into civilian life. By utilizing a neuroanthropological lens, ethnographic inquiry, surveys, semi-structured interviews, and focus groups, this research advances anthropology’s understanding of how sport participation may have the ability to combat assimilation and mental health challenges that are a result of combative trauma exposure. I examine BJJ as a physical and mental tool for strengthening social bonds, buttressing identity formation, and easing the burden of transitioning into a civilian life after enduring time within a combative theater. This analysis is a building block for future research that will explore BJJ as an avenue of elective intervention for veterans suffering from stress and anxiety disorders associated with time in service.

This thesis seeks to explore the relationship between Mormon assimilation, exceptionalism, and their endeavors in secular reading by analyzing Out of the Best Books (OOBB), a 1964–71 five-volume reading guide and reading program on secular reading established by the Mormon Church for its women’s organization, the Relief Society. Examining the approaches to secular literature in the OOBB program suggests that Mormons can respond to their competing desires to separate and assimilate by making efforts that fulfill both aspirations simultaneously rather than moving exclusively in one direction. Yet OOBB’s efforts to achieve both objectives did not amount to an entirely seamless navigation of this paradox. The program’s attempts to incorporate texts that might challenge Mormon notions of morality as well as their efforts to introduce world literature and fully address their female audience raised additional tensions particularly relevant to contemporary Mormonism, suggesting the complexity of Mormons navigating this identity paradox both within the context of the OOBB program and today. Furthermore, this examination of OOBB offers a venture at fleshing out the history of Mormon reading, confirming Mormons’ relationship to literature as central to their conception and expression of identity and situating Mormon reading endeavors in the broader context of American reading practices.