Divergent Pathways: How Pre-Orientation Programs Can Shape the Transition to College for First-Generation, Low-Income Students

First-generation, low-income (FGLI) students attend college at historically high rates in the United States. However, FGLI students continue to struggle in transitioning to college, particularly in elite universities. In this article, we engage with interview and supplemental survey data from 40 FGLI students at an elite university to demonstrate how self-advocacy skills—conceptualized as a form of cultural capital—can support FGLI students' transition into college. We do this through the case of pre-orientation programs, which are increasingly offered across universities, where half of the sample participated in pre-orientation and half did not. We interviewed both subsets at the start of their first academic year, as well as during their COVID-19-induced departure from campus residences. In response, we argue that students who participated in pre-orientation more often demonstrate self-advocacy skills, both in-person and online, especially in comparison with those who did not participate. We show that forming relationships with peers, as well as faculty and staff, during pre-orientation is key to enacting self-advocacy. Lastly, we also respond to previous studies that typically associate self-advocacy skills with the cultural competencies of higher-income and continuing-generation students, while making clear how these skills can benefit FGLI students in transitioning into school

Ecological Momentary Assessment based Differences between Android and iOS Users of the TrackYourHearing mHealth Crowdsensing Platform

mHealth technologies are increasingly utilized in various medical contexts. Mobile crowdsensing is such a technology, which is often used for data collection scenarios related to questions on chronic disorders. One prominent reason for the latter setting is based on the fact that powerful Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMA) can be performed. Notably, when mobile crowdsensing solutions are used to integrate EMA measurements, many new challenges arise. For example, the measurements must be provided in the same way on different mobile operating systems. However, the newly given possibilities can surpass the challenges. For example, if different mobile operating systems must be technically provided, one direction could be to investigate whether users of different mobile operating systems pose a different behaviour when performing EMA measurements. In a previous work, we investigated differences between iOS and Android users from the TrackYourTinnitus mHealth crowdsensing platform, which has the goal to reveal insights on the daily fluctuations of tinnitus patients. In this work, we investigated differences between iOS and Android users from the TrackYourHearing mHealth crowdsensing platform, which aims at insights on the daily fluctuations of patients with hearing loss. We analyzed 3767 EMA measurements based on a daily applied questionnaire of 84 patients. Statistical analyses have been conducted to see whether these 84 patients differ with respect to the used mobile operating system and their given answers to the EMA measurements. We present the obtained results and compare them to the previous mentioned study. Our insights show the differences in the two studies and that the overall results are worth being investigated in a more indepth manner. Particularly, it must be investigated whether the used mobile operating system constitutes a confounder when gathering EMA-based data through a crowdsensing platform

Following the Money: The Wire and Distant American Studies

In this essay, I argue that the pedagogical, or, more generally, heuristic potential of HBO’s crime drama The Wire (2002/2008) is related to the specific institutional developments in post-network television, the show’s didactic intention, and its focus on the delineation of the economic process, or what has been called its “openly class-based” politics. I will dedicate most time to the latter, as it represents a particularly welcome intervention for American Studies, a discipline in which the problem of class has usually been either marginalized, or articulated in terms of the historically hegemonic disciplinary paradigm, that of identity

Network Ambivalence

<p>The language of networks now describes everything from the Internet to the economy to terrorist organizations. In distinction to a common view of networks as a universal, originary, or necessary form that promises to explain everything from neural structures to online traffic, this essay emphasizes the contingency of the network imaginary. Network form, in its role as our current cultural dominant, makes scarcely imaginable the possibility of an alternative or an outside uninflected by networks. If so many things and relationships are figured as networks, however, then what is not a network? If a network points towards particular logics and qualities of relation in our historical present, what others might we envision in the future? In  many ways, these questions are unanswerable from within the contemporary moment. Instead of seeking an avant-garde approach (to move beyond networks) or opting out of networks (in some cases, to recover elements of pre-networked existence), this essay proposes a third orientation: one of ambivalence that operates as a mode of extreme presence. I propose the concept of "network aesthetics," which can be tracked across artistic media and cultural forms, as a model, style, and pedagogy for approaching interconnection in the twenty-first century. </p><p>The following essay is excerpted from <em>Network Ambivalence </em>(Forthcoming from University of Chicago Press). </p

Patrick Jagoda on Collaboration at the Global Midwest Conference

Patrick Jagoda discusses collaboration across the University and some recent projects developed by the Game Changer Design Lab. The presentation took place as part of the first Global Midwest Conference, a kickoff event for the Humanities Without Walls grant initiative of the same name.Andrew W. Mellon FoundationOpe

Network Aesthetics: American Fictions in the Culture of Interconnection

<p><p>Following World War II, the network emerged as both a major material structure and one of the most ubiquitous metaphors of the globalizing world. Over subsequent decades, scientists and social scientists increasingly applied the language of interconnection to such diverse collective forms as computer webs, terrorist networks, economic systems, and disease ecologies. The prehistory of network discourse can be traced back to descriptions of cellular formations in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the invention of the electrical telegraph in the nineteenth century. Even so, it was not until the 1940s that researchers and writers began to rely on a more generalized network vocabulary to reflect fledgling material modes of interlinked organization and construct a new postwar vision of the world.</p></p> <p><p>Since the 1970s, the field of network science has given rise to an even wider range of research on complexity, self-organization, sustainability, group interactions, and systemic resilience. Scientists such as Albert-Laszlo Barabasi have studied network design and new media critics such as Alexander Galloway have addressed network ontology. This dissertation contends that to grasp the effects of networks on globalization, we must also look at the fears, hopes, and affects that they generate. While network scientists have been less concerned with the cultural fears, political investments, and changes in human subjectivity signaled by networks, my study of American literature focuses on writers, filmmakers, and media innovators who have captured the deep transformations of the era of interconnection. These artists have achieved insights about networks not through scientific analysis, but through aesthetic, narrative, and media-specific experimentation.</p></p> <p><p><italic>Network Aesthetics</italic> examines how contemporary American literature, film, television, and new media dramatize the affects -- alternatively terrifying and thrilling -- of interconnection. This interdisciplinary project combines numerous methodologies, including literary analysis, media studies, cultural criticism, and political theory. Given the importance of networks to representation, communication, and computing, these structures serve as an ideal hinge for operating intermedia exchanges. Using varied tools, I analyze terrorist networks (Stephen Gaghan's <italic>Syriana</italic>), financial systems (Don DeLillo's <italic>Underworld</italic>), computer webs (Marge Piercy's <italic>He, She, and It</italic>), neoimperial networks (Thomas Pynchon's <italic>Gravity's Rainbow</italic>), social networks (David Simon's <italic>The Wire</italic>), and interactive game networks (Persuasive Games' <italic>Killer Flu</italic>). In the end, I argue that obsessions with abstract network threats and solutions reveal a change in the most dramatic social protocols of our connected world. Understanding how networks have formally come to evoke fear can help us grow less susceptible to an American politics of terror and more able to act justly as we negotiate our interconnected world.</p></p>Dissertatio

A Labyrinth: Designing and Playing a Collaborative Game During COVID-19

A Labyrinth was an alternate reality game developed at the University of Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic. The game was created to spur creativity and build community online under the unprecedented and emergent conditions of the pandemic. On April 6, 2020, A Labyrinth began with an opening puzzle that unlocked the game and attracted approximately 3,500 players. A week later, on April 13, the Fourcasters (the designers) welcomed 73 core teams to compete by completing 140 quests. Alongside the competitive aspect, the game had a parallel collaborative dimension. Via the Twitch live streaming platform, players were invited to explore the alternative space-time known as Labyrinth. Once a week, via a live and collectively adjudicated interactive narrative format, players helped the Taur locate key hubs and hidden objects as they tried to make it back to the center of Labyrinth. They succeeded in this objective and saw the Labyrinth transform in an unprecedented way. On May 13, the game concluded with over 800 quests being submitted by participating teams. This panel will screen a short documentary that includes footage from gameplay on Twitch, instances of quests, and interviews with players. Following this short screening, the five core designers will discuss the challenges and affordances of designing a transmedia narrative and improvised game during a pandemic. We will begin with the question: What does it mean to grapple with the unfolding historical present through a participatory networked artwork