Indigenous Women, Mother Tongues, and Nation Building in New England: A Tribal Policy Leadership Series

In collaboration with the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project (WLRP), Indigenous women educators and leaders, the Dept. of Women’s and Gender Studies is redesigning WOST/WGS 270, Native American Women in North America, to incorporate a lecture series on nation building and a semester-long community engagement project fostering student leadership in a research and policy formation project focused on legislating and funding a Native American language education law in Massachusetts

I am a Contradiction: Feminism and Feminist Identity in the Third Wave

How is Third Wave feminism defined? What are the implications for self-labeling as a feminist and the evolution of the “I’m not a feminist, but. . . .” group? While much controversy surrounds the etiology and even the very existence of a “Third Wave” of feminism, this nascent movement is a significant aspect of the current dialogue on contemporary feminism. Therefore, it is important to examine the history and the meaning of the identity of Third Wave. In an attempt to elucidate contemporary feminism, four key Third Wave collections of personal narratives were chosen and analyzed for current definitions of feminism. The anthologies used for this research contain the voices of numerous activists from 1995 to 2006 and represent a diverse range of individuals. A thematic analysis produced four themes: inclusion, multiplicity, contradiction, and everyday feminism. An analysis of the interconnections of these themes brought forth the question of whether a movement that is genuinely attuned to inclusion, multiplicity and contradiction can embrace the feminist label, or any label. Labels create boundaries and define the in-group, which is antithetical to these principles of Third Wave feminism. This might explain the current trend in research that finds many individuals supporting feminist ideology but resisting the feminist label. That is, the phrase “I’m not a feminist, but. . . .” may not simply be a reaction to a disparaged label but more precisely, an acknowledgement of the limits and liabilities of categorization

Negative thermal expansion in the plateau state of a magnetically-frustrated spinel

We report on negative thermal expansion (NTE) in the high-field, half-magnetization plateau phase of the frustrated magnetic insulator CdCr2O4. Using dilatometry, we precisely map the phase diagram at fields of up to 30T, and identify a strong NTE associated with the collinear half-magnetization plateau for B > 27T. The resulting phase diagram is compared with a microscopic theory for spin-lattice coupling, and the origin of the NTE is identified as a large negative change in magnetization with temperature, coming from a nearly-localised band of spin excitations in the plateau phase. These results provide useful guidelines for the discovery of new NTE materials.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figure

Comparative analysis of selected object-relational mapping systems for the .NET platform

This article is devoted to the comparison of two object-relational mapping systems supported by .NET platform - Entity Framework Core and NHibernate. The research hypothesis “framework NHibernate is more efficient than Entity Framework Core in the context of DML operations” was put forward. In order to make an efficiency analysis of ORM frameworks, a desktop application was designed and implemented to enable testing and visualization of results. The NHibernate framework turned out to be much more efficient than Entity Framework Core in single tests and slightly faster in bulk tests. The stability of both frameworks was similar

A customisable pipeline for continuously harvesting socially-minded Twitter users

On social media platforms and Twitter in particular, specific classes of users such as influencers have been given satisfactory operational definitions in terms of network and content metrics. Others, for instance online activists, are not less important but their characterisation still requires experimenting. We make the hypothesis that such interesting users can be found within temporally and spatially localised contexts, i.e., small but topical fragments of the network containing interactions about social events or campaigns with a significant footprint on Twitter. To explore this hypothesis, we have designed a continuous user profile discovery pipeline that produces an ever-growing dataset of user profiles by harvesting and analysing contexts from the Twitter stream. The profiles dataset includes key network and content-based users metrics, enabling experimentation with user-defined score functions that characterise specific classes of online users. The paper describes the design and implementation of the pipeline and its empirical evaluation on a case study consisting of healthcare-related campaigns in the UK, showing how it supports the operational definitions of online activism, by comparing three experimental ranking functions. The code is publicly available.Comment: Procs. ICWE 2019, June 2019, Kore