The Chicana/o/x Promise: Testimonios of Educational Empowerment through the Enactment of La Facultad among First-Generation College Students

This article explores how Chicana/o/x[i] first-generation college students navigate through the educational realm that is built upon coloniality. Drawing on four testimonios, we show how multiplicative forms of marginalization to which Chicana/o/x college students are subject inform their academic trajectory and empowerment. The article focuses on four main sources of oppression—class (capitalism), familial immigrant documentation status (racist nativism), disability (ableism), and sexuality (heteronormativity)—and how Chicana/o/x students turn them into sources of self- and community- empowerment.  Employing Chicana feminist perspectives and intersectional approaches further allows us to reveal sociopolitical and cultural processes that limits Chicana/o/x students’ access to resources and opportunities and how these processes inform the ways in which these individuals proactively achieve and represent the Chicana/o/x Promiseof hope, resistance, and success.

Perceptions Of Inequality As Racial Projects: Uncovering Ethnoracial And Gendered Patterns Among First-generation College-going Asian American Students

Through a Racial Formation Framework, this article explores how Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese American first-generation college students at a large research university perceive inequality in the United States. Drawing on 129 interviews, our findings suggest that students operate under a Racial Formation Inequality Spectrum in which they conceptualize contemporary racial projects through distinct structural-to-cultural explanations. Korean American students in this sample deploy a cultural understanding of inequality embedded within structural frames, while Chinese and Vietnamese American students employ more structural perspectives integrating critiques of cultural explanations. We also find that gender shapes these factors, as most women respondents are more likely than men to view inequality from a structural lens and utilize more sophisticated conceptualizations where they critique purely cultural explanations. Ultimately, we argue that the discourse about perceptions of inequality can serve as a form of racial projects. The results of this research shed light on how social locations such as ethnorace and gender contribute to divergent understandings of inequality in the United States as described by Asian American college students. The findings have direct implications for student sense of belonging and success in higher education contexts

Supporting Accurate Interpretation of Self-Administered Medical Test Results for Mobile Health: Assessment of Design, Demographics, and Health Condition

Background: Technological advances in personal informatics allow people to track their own health in a variety of ways, representing a dramatic change in individuals’ control of their own wellness. However, research regarding patient interpretation of traditional medical tests highlights the risks in making complex medical data available to a general audience. Objective: This study aimed to explore how people interpret medical test results, examined in the context of a mobile blood testing system developed to enable self-care and health management. Methods: In a preliminary investigation and main study, we presented 27 and 303 adults, respectively, with hypothetical results from several blood tests via one of the several mobile interface designs: a number representing the raw measurement of the tested biomarker, natural language text indicating whether the biomarker’s level was low or high, or a one-dimensional chart illustrating this level along a low-healthy axis. We measured respondents’ correctness in evaluating these results and their confidence in their interpretations. Participants also told us about any follow-up actions they would take based on the result and how they envisioned, generally, using our proposed personal health system. Results: We find that a majority of participants (242/328, 73.8%) were accurate in their interpretations of their diagnostic results. However, 135 of 328 participants (41.1%) expressed uncertainty and confusion about their ability to correctly interpret these results. We also find that demographics and interface design can impact interpretation accuracy, including false confidence, which we define as a respondent having above average confidence despite interpreting a result inaccurately. Specifically, participants who saw a natural language design were the least likely (421.47 times, P=.02) to exhibit false confidence, and women who saw a graph design were less likely (8.67 times, P=.04) to have false confidence. On the other hand, false confidence was more likely among participants who self-identified as Asian (25.30 times, P=.02), white (13.99 times, P=.01), and Hispanic (6.19 times, P=.04). Finally, with the natural language design, participants who were more educated were, for each one-unit increase in education level, more likely (3.06 times, P=.02) to have false confidence. Conclusions: Our findings illustrate both promises and challenges of interpreting medical data outside of a clinical setting and suggest instances where personal informatics may be inappropriate. In surfacing these tensions, we outline concrete interface design strategies that are more sensitive to users’ capabilities and conditions

Uncovering the Archive: (Auto)biographical Documentaries and the “Moment of Discovery”

With the proliferation of digital archives as fixtures in our daily lives, the study of physical archives and their contents becomes more important than ever. Archives now function as sites for determining historical context and narratives, with formal archival institutions often acting as the foundations for ideas of nation-building. However, I argue that it is the informal archives—whether communal, familial, personal, or otherwise—which should be central to our analysis of physical archives and their place between the pages of history. These informal archives necessarily question the role of the formal archive in narrativizing dominant histories with one of the key sites of debate occurring within the documentary genre, and specifically documentaries by diasporic filmmakers. In many such films, there is a crucial “moment of discovery,” wherein the found archival object marks the filmmaker as part of an alternative history that troubles the ingrained historical record. This “moment” marks the disruptions that the stories by diasporic people have upon traditions of proliferating alternative histories to counter dominant narratives and storytelling. The works which I will be exploring as examples of this filmic tradition are Random Acts of Legacy (2018), Retour (2017), and Shirkers (2018). All three of these films draw on this “moment of discovery” to build outwards, overlaying new interpretations of history onto these archival objects. I seek to understand what can be learned from these alternative histories

Algorithms as Folding: Reframing the Analytical Focus. 6(2): 1-12.

This article proposes an analytical approach to algorithms that stresses operations of folding. The aim of this approach is to broaden the common analytical focus on algorithms as biased and opaque black boxes, and to instead highlight the many relations that algorithms are interwoven with. Our proposed approach thus highlights how algorithms fold heterogeneous things: data, methods and objects with multiple ethical and political effects. We exemplify the utility of our approach by proposing three specific operations of folding—proximation, universalisation and normalisation. The article develops these three operations through four empirical vignettes, drawn from different settings that deal with algorithms in relation to AIDS, Zika and stock markets. In proposing this analytical approach, we wish to highlight the many different attachments and relations that algorithms enfold. The approach thus aims to produce accounts that highlight how algorithms dynamically combine and reconfigure different social and material heterogeneities as well as the ethical, normative and political consequences of these reconfigurations

Characterizing the pre-clinical phase of inflammatory bowel disease

Understanding the biological changes that precede a diagnosis of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) could facilitate pre-emptive interventions, including risk factor modification, but this pre-clinical phase of disease remains poorly characterized. Using measurements from 17 hematological and biochemical parameters taken up to 10 years before diagnosis in over 20,000 IBD patients and population controls, we address this at massive scale. We observe widespread significant changes in multiple biochemical and hematological parameters that occur up to 8 years before diagnosis of Crohn's disease (CD) and up to 3 years before diagnosis of ulcerative colitis. These changes far exceed previous expectations regarding the length of this pre-diagnostic phase, revealing an opportunity for earlier intervention, especially in CD. In summary, using a nationwide, case-control dataset-obtained from the Danish registers-we provide a comprehensive characterization of the hematological and biochemical changes that occur in the pre-clinical phase of IBD.</p

The Herbertsmithite Hamiltonian: μ\muSR measurements on single crystals

We present transverse field muon spin rotation/relaxation measurements on single crystals of the spin-1/2 kagome antiferromagnet Herbertsmithite. We find that the spins are more easily polarized when the field is perpendicular to the kagome plane. We demonstrate that the difference in magnetization between the different directions cannot be accounted for by Dzyaloshinksii-Moriya type interactions alone, and that anisotropic axial interaction is present.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, accepted to JPCM special issue on geometrically frustrated magnetis

Banner News

https://openspace.dmacc.edu/banner_news/1136/thumbnail.jp

Addressing water poverty under climate crisis: implications for social policy

Access to safe, clean and affordable water is a basic human right and a global goal towards which climate change poses new challenges that heavily impact the health and wellbeing of people across the globe and exacerbate or create new inequalities. These challenges are shaped by a number of geographical and social conditions that, apart from the risks of weather-driven impacts on water, include water governance and management arrangements in place, including pricing tariffs, and the interplay of social and economic inequalities. Building on examples from Australia, Scotland and England and Wales that illustrate access to water in different types of water provision systems, and regarding to aspects of access, quality and affordability, this paper explores the types of challenges related to water poverty in the context of climate crisis and reflects on the multiple dimensions of water poverty oriented social policy at the interplay of climate change associated risks