<p> In Sub-Saharan Africa almost 600 million people currently live in the darkness of energy poverty, and millions more will be without energy access in 2030 due to population growth and slow grid expansion. Solar PV technology is a viable alternative to grid expansion, and off-grid solar products (&lt; 10W&ndash;1kW) are projected to make a significant contribution toward achieving the United Nations&rsquo; goal of sustainable energy access for all by 2030. Off-grid solar products will save people money, supply more and brighter light, create opportunities to generate income, and have a positive impact on health, education, gender equality, the environment, and quality of life. While numerous stakeholders have made substantial efforts to grow this market, progress has been hindered by a limited understanding of the processes which underlie solar technology adoption in emerging economies. I aimed to reveal these processes by developing and applying a holistic theoretical framework that illuminates the off-grid solar technology adoption process. </p><p> I synthesized the relevant literature into an actionable theory of change that elucidates the fundamental mechanisms which drive solar adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa. I utilized this theory of change to integrate a broad array of data and model results originating from 324 surveys of current and potential solar users in Northern Tanzania. The theory of change allowed my colleagues and I to draw more concise and meaningful conclusions. We found that limited awareness of financial benefits was the main barrier preventing additional solar market growth in this area. The theory of change also provided guidance as I developed an intervention to address this barrier. I proposed an intervention, and rigorous evaluation thereof, which will raise awareness through first-hand experience with solar products, underscore the benefits through automated text messages, and increase peer referrals through text-based incentives. This intervention could be implemented by the relevant stakeholders to potentially increase solar uptake, and contribute to achieving sustainable energy access for all by 2030&mdash;the ultimate motivation behind developing and applying this off-grid solar theory of change.</p><p>

<p> The new economy, which is information-centric, enabled by the computerization of business, social, and communication tools, and globally scaled by networking technologies, is fueling high rates of workforce mobility. Careers are shorter and more diverse, with individuals flowing sequentially from organizational socialization episode to episode, at a rapid pace, into different cultures, even cultures that may be in conflict with each other. </p><p> To expand our understanding of this phenomenon my study examined the plasticity of human socialization. It focused on the practices that enable individual, situated socialization flow between organizations. I chose &ldquo;chameleon&rdquo; hackers who adaptively flow between hacker and corporate InfoSec socialization episodes for my study population. </p><p> I used qualitative methodology to study this situated socialization phenomenon and modified grounded theory to build my theoretical models. Using practice theory with habitus as a sensitizing concept and life course theoretical orientation, my study examined the processes that constitute the situated socialization practice used by my informants which they call &ldquo;code switching.&rdquo; I used autoethnographic case studies from my participation in five hacker conventions that spanned over 4 years, semi-structured interviews with 17 highly accomplished and corporately socialized chameleon hackers, and archived data sources. </p><p> My study identified that my informants possess seven core internal habitus attributes that are essential to the accomplishment of hacker work tasks. These core attributes do not vary as the organizational socialization episode varies. My informants&rsquo; code switching consists of a reflexive habitus adaptation practice that is cued to their situated socialization flow and guided by the same five phases hackers use to execute a hack. When plotted over time, these episodes form a unidirectional chain of socialization over their lifetime. My chameleon hacker informants use metacognitive strategies framed by an empathetic stance to reflexively adapt an outward facing set of habitus attributes to achieve socialization congeniality with the situated organization. This cued socialization flow is catalyzed by the potential for an exchange of economic or social capital or the award of symbolic capital between the organization and the chameleon hacker. The chameleon hacker also uses a similar metacognitive strategy to enter a state of flow to accomplish individual-based hacker work tasks. </p><p> This study expands the unit of analysis for organizational socialization to include what happens before and after a socialization episode and begins a theoretical conversation on the &ldquo;how to&rdquo; of adaptive reflexive habitus practice.</p><p>

abstract: Systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), or lupus, is a rare autoimmune disease in which the antibodies that are formed in the body attack healthy tissues and organs. The most prevalent physical manifestation of the illness is fatigue. Fatigue often plagues patients with no warning and without leaving a trace of measurable evidence. The issue of fatigue’s invisibility and the difficulties of communicating the experience of fatigue has been shown to impact relationships with friends, family, and physicians. It is important for patients to understand their condition in order to better identify their own triggers, manage their condition, and communicate their symptoms to friends, families, and other medical professionals. The study sought to explore the lived experience of women who have lupus, describe the impact of symptom invisibility on social support and patient-doctor relationships, identify effective strategies in communicating and managing the condition, and describe the broad range of life changes associated with the disease. The study utilized in-depth, semi-structured interviews to gather detailed information from eleven women with lupus. Six overarching themes emerged from the data: difficulties with diagnosis, discovering lupus is a process, managing lupus, social impact of lupus, communicating the experience, and limitations of the healthcare system. Symptom invisibility was not frequently cited as the cause of any interpersonal problems faced by the participants. Rather, the results suggest that the current healthcare system in the United States may not be equipped to adequately care for patients with lupus. This study provides insight for recommendations to patients with lupus and may inform cultural and policy changes necessary to improve healthcare delivery. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Psychology 2016

<p> Young people who are homeless or runaway encounter numerous barriers in obtaining an education (Milner,2013). Concurrently, their schooling experiences have been restricted by neoliberal policy initiatives that have muted investments in building an engaged US citizenry, moving curriculum from content to skill-based learning (Au, 2013). Since civic opportunities for young adults in marginalized communities are not often available and unevenly distributed across social class and race/ethnicity (Ginwright, 2010), participants and I co-created a youth activism club with participants to gain a fuller, more nuanced understanding of the intersection of literacies, civic engagement, and homeless urban youth aged 16-23. </p><p> This study draws upon positioning theory and narrative inquiry and works to uncover the ways young people of color who frequented the Scope Resource Center (SRC) for Homeless and Runaway Youth positioned themselves towards critical literacies and as activists in their communities. </p><p> Primary findings indicate examinations of power structures morphed as participants expanded critical thinking outwardly over time, moving from micro, through mezzo, and into macro level questioning. Participants engaged in dialogue around texts resulting in intertextual multiliterate positioning and associations were made between critical YA texts and embodied civic action, enabling participants to position themselves as cultural critics and resisters of the status quo. Data suggests established adolescent civic engagement indicators (Flanagan &amp; Levine, 2010) need to be adapted and expanded to include indicators linked to new literacies and online spaces that helped participants position themselves as active, engaged citizens.</p><p>

<p> <i>Enabling Geographies: Neurodivergence, Self-Authorship, and the Politics of Social Space</i> examines and co-documents the political relevance of alternative educational, vocational, and community-living strategies developed and implemented by autistic grassroots educators serving autistic and otherwise neurodivergent youth in Berkeley, California. These educators reject the conceptualization and treatment of neurodivergent embodiment and expression as a medical pathology or a charity case and, in concert with grassroots disability justice initiatives, reclaim it instead as a vibrant cultural and political experience. They so do while simultaneously calling for the emancipation and collective liberation of all disabled people. More specifically, our collaborative inquiry documents the role of autistic educators in the visioning of strategies designed to enable a creative opening of differential social spaces wherein to freely and fully embody neurodivergence. Neurodivergence is an umbrella term covering a wide range of alternative individual neurocognitive styles. </p><p> One of the main arguments of this dissertation is that disabled service providers are uniquely positioned to intervene and unsettle institutionalized ableism vis-&agrave;-vis &ldquo;safety-net&rdquo; programs, especially against the historical backdrop of traditional community (care) services. The term &lsquo;transition services&rsquo; means a coordinated set of activities to facilitate a disabled person&rsquo;s movement from school to post-school activities. To document these strategies, the autistic leaders in question and myself co-designed the line of inquiry, methodology, and goals of this dissertation. We held collaborative meetings, interviews, and group conferences for almost two years. Our findings are presented through activist ethnographic vignettes, oral narrative analysis, and historical-analytical frameworks emerging from disability studies, activist anthropology, critical sociology, postmodern philosophy, and critical human geography. Overall, our methodology aims at capturing the program&rsquo;s dynamics and philosophy, its gains and successes, as well as the institutional barriers and limitations to developing and sustaining autistic leadership roles in disability service provision.</p><p>

abstract: none / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S.Tech Technology 2013

<p> This dissertation presents three sociological essays analyzing advertising agencies through the lens of cultural economic sociology. Drawing on 12 months of ethnographic research and 81 interviews across four American advertising agencies, this dissertation presents three explorations of how meaning-making processes are central to the various processes of advertising production. </p><p> The first essay explores how market intermediaries help other market actors see the market and their opportunities for action within it. The essay article illustrates how advertising practitioners provide their clients with visions of what the market is and what opportunities for action lie within it, developing advertising campaigns to match that vision. These accounts of the market and its opportunities are dynamically negotiated, both reflecting and shaping the identities of the clients, their target audiences, and the intermediaries themselves. Because intermediaries dramaturgically perform these interpretations of the market for their client in micro-level interactions, they must also deal with disagreement, contestation, and negotiation over their visions of the market.</p><p> The second essay explores how advertising agencies consume and produce consumer research. Taking a relational approach to the production of advertising, this essay conceives of the work agencies do as part of establishing viable exchange relationships with their clients in which the client exchanges money for the agency's ideas for campaigns. The analysis shows how agency employees&mdash;in particular, account planners&mdash;first negotiate what kinds of consumers matter with their clients, then produce consumer research in ways that helps them generate particular types of qualitative materials. Agency employees then use those materials to craft aesthetic, material representations of the consumer that can serve as exchange media to facilitate the broader exchange of campaign ideas and money.</p><p> The third essay takes adopts a pragmatic sociological framework to examine conflict in advertising agencies, suggesting such conflicts can be better understood as inevitable clashes between different regimes for justifying the value of advertising work. The article examines three such regimes that advertising practitioners use to justify the work they do: the regime of <i> partnership</i>, the regime of <i>expertise</i>, and the regime of <i>brokerage</i>. Each regime supposes its own definition of what is good advertising work, how that work is evaluated, and how that work should be done, as well as what relationships there should be between the agents who do the work and their clients. Furthermore, each regime has its critiques of the others, and compromises between regimes are unstable and temporary. The different types of conflicts that arise from clashes between these regimes can be understood as the outcome of threats to the different social bonds supposed by each of those regimes.</p><p> These articles are prefaced by a broad discussion of the intellectual projects of economic sociology, in which the literature is divided into two camps: one that studies the economy <i>of</i> culture, and one that studies the economy as culture. After reviewing the different conceptualizations of production and consumption in each, as well as considering the role of materiality and the relationship between the economic and the social, this discussion concludes with a commitment to studying the economy as the enactment of cultural intentions, opting for an analytical strategy that preserves the relative autonomy of culture in exploring how narratives and codes structure economic activity.</p><p>

<p> This research study is an attempt to learn how students with low socioeconomic status (SES) experience Appreciative Inquiry as an instructional literacy approach when compared to traditional (typically practiced) models of literacy intervention. Key findings will illuminate the effectiveness of strengths-based approaches to literacy achievement and experiences for marginalized students. This study will add to the growing research that policymakers must acknowledge as evidence that a complete overhaul of the deficit-based rationales as the dominant practice in education need to be reconsidered (Orr &amp; Cleveland-Innes, 2015). It can be postulated that a cultural shift to a strengths-based model within education will significantly impact student achievement for all student groups (Smith, Connolly, &amp; Pryseski, 2014). Arguably, this could close the achievement gap for marginalized students.</p><p>

<p> The use of simulations by social scientists in exploring theories and hypotheses is well documented. As computer systems have grown in capacity, so have interests of social scientists in executing larger simulations. Social scientists often approach their simulation design from the top down by selecting an Entity-Based Model (<b>EBM</b>) framework from those that are readily available, thus limiting modeling capability to the available frameworks. Ultimately, the framework is dependent upon what is at the bottom, the hardware architecture that serves as the foundation of the computing system. Parallel hardware architecture supports the simultaneous execution of a problem split into multiple pieces. Thus, the problem is solved faster in parallel. In this thesis, a selection of parallel hardware architectures is examined with a goal of providing support for EBMs. The hardware's capability to support parallelization of EBMs is described and contrasted. A simple EBM is tested to illustrate these capabilities and implementation challenges specific to parallel hardware are explored. The results of this research offer social scientists better informed choices than the sequential EBM frameworks that currently exist. Matching the model to the correct supporting hardware will permit larger scale problems to be examined and expands the range of models that a social scientist can explore.</p><p>

<p> Recent efforts to improve sexual assault issues within American universities are being pursued diligently. Many of these efforts include changes to college campus policies regarding sexual consent, often by mandating affirmative consent. The current study investigated perceptions of different types of sexual consent related to sexual script endorsement and consent attitudes in order to better assess how receptive college students may be to affirmative consent standards. </p><p> An online survey included four vignettes that were constructed to depict processes of sexual consent that differed in the enthusiasm with which the female character indicated her consent. Perceptions of the vignettes were evaluated regarding sexiness of the content and each character&rsquo;s enjoyment and internal consent. Further items assessed comparative evaluations of the vignettes. The Sexual Script Scale, External Consent Scale, and Sexual Consent Scale-Revised were also included in the survey. We expected that enthusiastic consent processes would be evaluated more positively than the unenthusiastic ones. We also predicted these evaluations would be significantly related to endorsement of traditional sexual scripts, external consent behaviors, and consent attitudes. </p><p> Full to partial support was found for each of our hypotheses, suggesting that college students are indeed receptive to affirmative consent regarding perceived enjoyment and sexiness when depicted as enthusiastically given.</p><p>