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Contemporary society is rapidly changing. The emergence of social inequalities and the use of new technologies to access communicates produce and exchange information among others deeply affects citizens and the complex interactions among citizens businesses and governments. This thesis explores how might technology in the future enable better communication with governments and higher participation of citizens in decision ma ing processes? It showcases a designerly way to approach this question while designing for interactions with an explicit intention of placing value in citizen participation in decision making processes with an aim towards plurality. The design outcomes showcase the possibility of employing technology to achieve greater levels of democratic citizen participation but that which would require major restructuring of government organisations and new ways of working with data.

In this dissertation I think-with figures of #AnthropoceneChild in speculative texts that story the end of the world through some form of climate catastrophe. In these post-apocalyptic tales, the child-figures do different things. Firstly, child-figures reflect problematics of the contemporary world without interrupting dominant patterns of thought, materiality, and governance. In these stories, the child is the future and the future is the child. Secondly, some child-figures are tasked with protecting a world in which they have been made disposable. This incites critical questions about distributions of racialized harm and also exposes the limits of survivalist logics. Thirdly, a few child-figures refuse current arrangements of existence and set in motion new worlds, even if the contours, forces, and politics cannot yet be fully described. These are speculative worlds of not this, what if, and not yet. Different aspects of this assemblage are centred at different moments in this dissertation. The looseness of the framework allows me to move between the unsettled complexities of bionormative childhoods, anthropogenic climate change, reproductive futurism, and structures of anti-blackness, settler colonialism, and white supremacy in relation to (1) child-figures at the end of a world, (2) child-figures who save their world, and (3) child-figures who destroy the world. This dissertation is organized into two main sections: Part I provides the theoretical background for the speculative arguments developed over Part II. In Part I, I unpack my proposal that #AnthropoceneChild bookends the Anthropocene. By this I mean that the language of birth, origin, and innocence finds repetitious form in scholarly discussions of Anthropocene beginnings, and that child-figures are pivotal to playing out the end of the world in pop culture performances of Anthropocene pedagogy. Part II consists of three chapters that engage with speculative child-figures that inherit and inhabit a damaged planet. This includes grappling with racialized technologies of care and abandonment, folding parent-child relations into environmental discourses of stewardship, and gesturing towards imaginaries of what might be possible after the end of the (white) world. The conclusion pulls the ideas and figures of previous chapters together in a queer-kin consideration of geos-futurities for #AnthropoceneChild wherein the end of the world might not be a cause for mourning but a possibility for an otherwise. / Graduate

The increasing prevalence of multi and many core processors has brought the issues of concurrency and parallelism to the forefront of everyday computing. Even for applications amenable to traditional parallelization techniques, the subtleties of concurrent programming are known to introduce concurrency bugs. Due to the potential of concurrency bugs, programmers find it hard to write correct concurrent code. To take full advantage of parallel shared memory platforms, application programmers need safe and efficient mechanisms that can support a wide range of parallel applications. In addition, a large body of applications are inherently hard-to-parallelize; their data and control dependencies impose execution order constraints that preclude the use of traditional parallelization techniques. Sensitive to their input data, a substantial number of applications fail to scale well, leaving cores idle. To improve the performance of such applications, application programmers need effective mechanisms that can fully leverage multi and many core architectures. These challenges stand in the way of realizing the true potential of emerging many core platforms. The techniques described in this dissertation address these challenges. Specifically, this dissertation contributes techniques to transparently detect and eliminate several concurrency bugs, including deadlocks, asymmetric write-write data races, priority inversion, live-locks, order violations, and bugs that stem from the presence of asynchronous signaling and locks. A second major contribution of this dissertation is a programming framework that exploits coarse-grain speculative parallelism to improve the performance of otherwise hard-to-parallelize applications. / Ph. D.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Through an analysis of the depiction of female protagonists in young adult dystopian and speculative works of fiction, this thesis establishes leadership studies as a theoretical framework for literary study. Leadership studies is a relatively young branch of academic inquiry, using interdisciplinary approaches to investigate the phenomenon of leadership. From psychology, sociology, and philosophy, to education, business, and history, leadership studies has both drawn from and provided insight into a variety of disciplines; however, these theories have not yet found their way into conversations about literature. My thesis pulls leadership studies away from its corporate connotations to establish it as a valid and valuable addition to our literary analysis repertoire through a demonstration of its potential to further conversations about texts. This analysis is positioned within the contexts of children’s literature, feminist theory, and practices of reading for ideology, anchoring leadership studies in already-established modes of inquiry while demonstrating how this field offers valuable insight into them. My focus on dystopian and speculative young adult novels reflects the recent surge in dystopic/postapocalyptic texts that feature strong female protagonists, presenting potential leadership strategies for young girl readers during an important stage of development. Thus, this thesis uses leadership studies to further our analysis of how agency, power, and gender are represented within children’s literature.

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The project is inspired by the idea of trying to simplify and create understanding on a broader level regarding the issues of climate change within the author’s field of design. How can design help us understand the relevance of acting now by visualizing how a potential future might look if action is not taken. Out of many issues that might arise due to climate change the project specifically targets that of desertification. The consequences global desertification already has on life and nature could potentially reach devastating levels in a not-so-distant future making it a highly important topic. Desertification if left uncontrolled is expected to force billions of people from the densest areas of the world onthe move by 2090. Driving densification of the last liveable land to reach unprecedented levels. This is a scenario that we want to stay clear of at all costs as it gambles our survival as a species on this planet. It would lead to the creation of vast unhabitable areas, potentially major conflicts, and large-scale segregation. Leaving little to no room for our ally nature to regenerate would mean the mass extinction of species and potentially life on our planet. To enforce the urgency of action taking the project steps into the distant future of 2086 to portray how a growing desert would have affected the way we live, the struggles it has brought, and how we are putting all efforts towards assisted regeneration of the planet. As much as the project is speculative the scenario builds from data and analytics mapped by scientists and research within the fields of eco- science. As the issue of desertification is an already existing problem today. Scientists and inventors are working on ways to counter its growth. Taking inspiration and learnings from biodiverse reforestation work done today and applying it to the potential scenario allowed the author to highlight issues in the current process. As the scenario was pushed to the extreme so were the problems within the current system. Scalability, cost-effectiveness, and flexibility came up as some of the most prevalent issues. Mobility already plays a great role in distributing the efforts of today’s work and will come to play an even greater role in future reforestation efforts. With technological development and systematic changes come new possibilities for innovation. The process behind the development consisted of exploring solutions that hinder desertification whilst simultaneously promoting and assisting in the regeneration of nature. This involved research into large-scale reforestation development and up-and-coming technologies. Through creative development and ideation grew potential scenarios that resulted in story-driven final visuals. The result is Terra Nova. A lighter than air propelled cocnept that allows long term cargo- mobility in barren areas with minimal impact to the environment. The vehicle is multifunctional in the sense that it carries the capabilities of both personal and cargo transport making it a great all-around vehicle.

The countryside has been long forgotten while technology is changing at a rapid pace, something we’re not stopping to consider. In this thesis I aim to catalogue the current state of the countryside and it’s near future. Something that’s right in front of us but that we currently lack the resources to realise. The research work will be delivered in the form of speculative architecture and storytelling. It is presented as a book, with each chapter focusing on a different aspect of this new countryside and its potential. This research provides a platform for us to begin to think about these new scenarios and future prospects in order to design sensitively.  A majority of the work is delivered through montages. The compositions utilise already existing elements in society and combine them to produce new spaces that tells us something. I chose to use montages as I felt like they were a successful way to summarise the research of a broad subject field.