Thesis advisor: Ana M. Martinez Alemán / Completion of a college degree has been highlighted as a prerequisite for opportunity (Obama White House Archives, February 24, 2009); necessary for a strong economy (Koropeckyj, et al., 2017). Yet, the rate of completion in the United States remains lower than desired, directing focus toward efforts to promote student success and degree attainment. Within this out-comes oriented climate, academic advising is often viewed solely in terms of its utilitarian value, a means for ushering students toward the final goal of college completion. Without a clear conceptualization of the role of academic advising within higher education, it will continue to be susceptible to political, institutional, and economic forces, making it difficult for either the practice or the scholarly field of study to progress. More importantly, the absence of clear theoretical foundation leaves the profession vulnerable, diminishing the potential to effectively support students. The dissertation will contribute to the theoretical literature on academic advising. Drawing on the work of Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) a contextually inclusive theory of academic advising is introduced, laying conceptual foundation in which interpretation is central, meaning and truth are iterative, and understanding is structured by the conditions of human existence. I maintain that effective academic advising involves recognition of how things have meaning, from where, within what context, and as impacted by the (dis)connections students have with others, over time. Such an attunement offers foundation for equitable practice, inclusive of all students, validating their experiences (Rendón, 1994; Rendón & Muñoz, 2011), identifying obstacles that might impede their performance (NACADA, 2022), allowing them to feel a sense of belonging (Strayhorn, 2018), and providing a space for students to experience meaningful accomplishment. Overall, the dissertation argues that academic advising ought to be educationally driven, learning-focused, concerned with student completion, and informed by an understanding of the human being, the individual student, as a contextualized interpreter. This theory points us to reconsider advising caseloads, training, and institutional information sharing, in an effort to support the interpretive processes necessary for effective academic advising. Moreover, it offers a space to think deeply about the nature of academic advising, what it ought to entail, and how to effectively support students. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education. / Discipline: Educational Leadership and Higher Education.

Immigrant men often appear in discussions about crime and exclusion in the Swedish social debate. The purpose of this study was therefore to illustrate voices from individuals who have experiences of exclusion in relation to immigration to Sweden and establishment in Swedish society. Immigrant men’s experiences of exclusion and in-betweenness have been main issues in this study. The material chosen for this study are five autobiographical works in order to provide us with the authors' own descriptions of their experiences. Thematic analysis has been used as a method to be able to bring out the overall common experiences that appear in the books by presenting them as different themes. Erving Goffman's theories of stigma and self-presentation are used to explain experiences of feeling outside and in-between two countries that are made up of different cultural norms and societal structures. We found that the authors share similar experiences of exclusion and in-betweenness. The authors find themselves in alienation during a period of their lives because they are in a new context and differ in relation to the majority. It is also connected with the in-betweenness that we understand as having one foot in two worlds which is called liminality, a social transition the authors go through when they start to find themselves in a new context. The exclusion takes place on two fronts, in relation to their countrymen and the Swedish where the authors find themselves in an in-between state. / Invandrarmän förekommer ofta i diskussioner om kriminalitet och utanförskap i den svenska samhällsdebatten. Syftet med denna studie var därför att åskådliggöra röster från individer som har erfarenheter av utanförskap i samband med invandring till Sverige och etableringen i det svenska samhället. Invandrarmäns upplevelser av utanförskap och mellanförskap har varit huvudfrågor i denna studie. Empiri som valts för studien är fem självbiografiska verk för att kunna förse oss med författarnas egna beskrivningar av sina upplevelser. Tematisk analys har använts som metod för att kunna få fram de övergripande gemensamma upplevelser som förekommer i böckerna genom att presentera dem som olika teman. Erving Goffmans teorier om stigma och självframställning används för att förklara erfarenheter av att känna sig utanför och mellan två länder som utgörs av olika kulturella normer och samhällsstrukturer. Vi kom fram till att författarna delar liknande upplevelser av utanförskap och mellanförskap. Författarna befinner sig under en period av livet i ett utanförskap eftersom de befinner sig i ett nytt sammanhang och är avvikande i relation till majoriteten. Det hänger även ihop med mellanförskapet som vi förstår som att ha en fot i två världar som benämns som liminalitet, en social övergång författarna genomgår då de börjar att befinna sig i en ny kontext. Utanförskapet sker på två fronter, i relation till sina landsmän och det svenska varvid författarna befinner sig i ett mellanförskap.

<p>     Organizations communicate messages to users of their physical spaces via artifacts and features that compose the spaces. I argue that these infrastructural messages are invitations to users to identify with the organization. I argue further that an individual’s experience of these messages—via user experience—may (or may not) evoke a sense of belonging. In order to explore what it looks like for a user to feel like they (do not) belong, this autoethnographic study explores the different infrastructural messages within the public bathrooms of 70 buildings on Purdue University’s main campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. </p> <p>     The main research question for this study is: how do public bathrooms, as a part of the physical infrastructure of an organization, communicate belonging through user experience in them? To explore this question, concepts of identification, belonging, physical space, and time were important to explicate. Identification looks at what it means to identify with an organization and ways that individuals have been invited to identify with the organization by the organization. This study further examines how one feels about an organization that they identify with by looking at one’s sense of belonging to a space. Consideration of space brought considerations about affordances, user experience, and hostile architecture. Finally, an exploration of time aided this work in developing a means by which to investigate the relationship between measured and perceived time when navigating physical space under distress. </p> <p>     This autoethnography offers a deep perspective of one user’s (my) experience within the bathrooms. Additionally, this work employed the use of land surveying from landscape archaeology (e.g., examination of constituent parts of the bathrooms), user experience field notes (e.g., collection of unique aspects of each bathroom as well as detailed experience reflections), and a unique methodological tool for collecting and comparing measured and perceived time. </p> <p>     Analysis of data collected based on a combination of these methods showed that how—beyond available affordances and barriers—the bathroom is used by an organizational member holds importance. Spatial design and navigational artifacts which can reduce the measured time for locating a bathroom are noticeable relative to the user’s experience of time (i.e., perceived time) to a point. However, when the user’s perception of time becomes less reliable, perceived distress seems to be the main feature coloring this experience. Therefore, spaces which challenge users physically and emotionally are not likely to be received as an invitation to members’ identification with that organization. Such messages impacted members’ sense of belonging to the organization. Further, through land surveying data of the artifacts and features of bathrooms combined with secondary data on building ages, this study assessed the University’s assumptions about the different type of bodies and needs that are present among their organizational members.</p> <p>     Theoretically, this work contributes a conceptual framework for belonging, fieldwork at the intersection of space and belonging, and a fat body taking up space within the literature. Methodologically, this work provides an innovative way of documenting time, a look at self-accommodation in research for scholars with disabilities, a demonstration of the use of embodied measurement, and a critique for user-centered and participatory design. In sum, this study illuminates what it was like for one fat body to try to meet her needs and reflect on how this impacted her sense of belonging to the University. This work has implications for further development of public bathrooms locally on Purdue’s campus as well as for scholarly inquiry about the relationships among organizational identification, belonging, user experience, and design of spaces. </p>

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Come hear Drs. Morelen and Moser present on the exciting field of infant mental health!

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This pedagogy of weaving the Nigerian Tiv a'nger into life writing, mobility and place blends in my experiences, cultures, geographical locations and stories. As I travel through and within countries as an international student, I draw from postcolonial and feminist scholars such as Anzaldua (1987), Bhabba (1994), Rushdie (2011) and Trinh (1994) in negotiating a hybrid space where my sense of belonging and home is continuously unsettled and negotiated. In this thesis, I use the a’nger as a metaphor for blending, merging and blurring text, identities, and questioning the conditions which produce stories, memories and events. In this auto/ethno/graphic pedagogy of weaving the Tiv a'nger into my encounters as a traveller, sojourner and mother, I am seeking to link my cultural background with my scholarship in the faculty of education and the faculty of law as a literary metissage that allows me to situate my narrative within broader sociopolitical discourses that query gender race and class issues (hooks, 2003; Fanon, 2008). I am guided by a desire to show that stories are research and that stories influence our movements as Africans in diaspora (Achebe, 1973; Wa Thiong’o, 1986). In drawing from the stories of my Tiv ancestors through African indigenous a’nger, I am guided by a quest to decolonize a space in academia to include other ways of knowing and being in the world. In retelling my stories, I open up conversations about the experiences of international students from Africa who relocate to other countries in the quest for continuous education. I use qualitative research methodologies such as auto/ethno/graphy (Douglas & Carless, 2013), bricolage (Kincheloe, 2005), metissage (Lionnet, 1991), multimodality (Morawski et al., 2016); and life writing (Hasebe-Ludt, Chambers & Leggo, 2009) to linger, tarry and trouble the sites between history and culture, home and abroad, us and them.

Conventional language models estimate the probability that a word sequence within a chosen language will occur. By contrast, the purpose of our work is to estimate the probability that the word sequence belongs to the chosen language. The language of interest in our research is comprehensible well-formed English. We explain how conventional language models assume what we refer to as a degree of generalization, the extent to which a model generalizes from a given sequence. We explain why such an assumption may hinder estimation of the probability that a sequence belongs. We show that the probability that a word sequence belongs to a chosen language (represented by a given sequence) can be estimated by avoiding an assumed degree of generalization, and we introduce two methods for doing so: Minimal Number of Segments (MINS) and Segment Selection. We demonstrate that in some cases both MINS and Segment Selection perform better at distinguishing sequences that belong from those that do not than any other method we tested, including Good-Turing, interpolated modified Kneser-Ney, and the Sequence Memoizer.

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The purpose of this study is to examine how young Afro-Swedes view their identity and sense of belonging in Swedish society, and whether they face challenges and how it affects their social inclusion. This is examined through eight semi-structured interviews with six women and two men who are all born and raised in Sweden. Furthermore, thematic analyses have been applied to the material. The two concepts that have been used to analyze and discuss the collected data is ethnicity and belonging. The results of this study indicates that young Afro-Swedes do not identify as Swedish mostly because society categorizes them as “immigrants”. There is a clear perception that Swedish people are all white, blond and blue eyed which they as black citizens do not fit into. Because of this, young Afro-Swedes have faced many challenges and some of them feel socially excluded. The challenges they have in common is racism and xenophobia which has negatively affected them in many ways. The result of this study also shows how social environment, skin color, religion, and residential area have a major impact on how Afro-Swedes choose to identify as well as their sense of belonging in Sweden.