This dissertation explores articulations of Black Womanhood during the socio-political crisis of police brutality against Black women during the 2010s. I use Stuart Hall’s concepts of conjuncture and articulation as the orientation to analyze three of Lifetime’s original reality television programs: Dance Moms, Bring It!, and Girlfriend Intervention. I contend that the discourses on these shows create articulations of Black womanhood that fail to reflect the realities of the complex social struggles and state-sanctioned police violence against unarmed Black women that led to the #SayHerName movement. Rather than portray the full realities of the Black female experience, the shows conceal the social unsettling experiences of being a Black woman in order to bring entertaining and banal discourses to the forefront. As such, those reductive articulations of Black Womanhood act as an unstable settlement, a temporary joist to the national social formation in an attempt to avoid radical socio-political reconfigurations.

Sensor technologies are vital today in gathering information about certain environments and wireless sensor networks are getting more widespread use everyday. These networks are characterized by a number of sensor nodes deployed in the field for the observation of some phenomena. Due to the limited battery capacity in sensor nodes, energy efficiency is a major and challenging problem in such power-constrained networks. Some of the network design parameters have a direct impact on the network&rsquo / s lifetime. These parameters have to be chosen in such a way that the network use its energy resources efficiently. This thesis studies these parameters that should be selected according to certain trade offs with respect to the network&rsquo / s lifetime. In this work, these trade offs have been investigated and illustrated in detail in various combinations. To achieve this goal, a special simulation tool has been designed and implemented in this work that helps in analyzing the effects of the selected parameters on sensor network&rsquo / s lifetime. OMNeT++, a discrete event simulator, provides the framework for the sensor network simulator&rsquo / s development. Ultimately, results of extensive computational tests are presented, which may be helpful in guiding the sensor network designers in optimally selecting the network parameters for prolonged lifetime.

In this thesis, we study the energy efficient coverage and connectivity problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). We try to locate heterogeneous sensors and route data generated to a base station under two conflicting objectives: minimization of network cost and maximization of network lifetime. We aim at satisfying connectivity and coverage requirements as well as sensor node and link capacity constraints. We propose mathematical formulations and use an exact solution approach to find Pareto optimal solutions for the problem. We also develop a multiobjective genetic algorithm to approximate the efficient frontier, as the exact solution approach requires long computation times. We experiment with our genetic algorithm on randomly generated problems to test how well the heuristic procedure approximates the efficient frontier. Our results show that our genetic algorithm approximates the efficient frontier well in reasonable computation times.