The malleability of disciplinary identity

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This paper tracks the progress of a beginning undergraduate writer's disciplinary becoming. Much research in disciplinary identity focuses on graduate students and advanced undergraduate writers; however, sites of disciplinary identity formation also occur early on during the required first-year writing course. These sites are crucial because they inform the student writer's entrance into the academic conversation, and reveal the extent to which early assumptions about disciplinary roles affects further disciplinary identity formation. Drawing from Ivanič's framework of writer identity, this case study reveals the ever-shifting tensions of "disciplinary becoming." The analysis captures how a writer's discursive self shifts from a static disciplinary identity to a more malleable disciplinary identity through a cross-analysis of two separate writing assignments in order to learn how the student's petroleum engineer identity is performed, contradicted and re-negotiated. I argue that this shift will enable writing knowledge transfer and overall identity formation

Storytelling: For Non-Profit Organizations

Storytelling can be traced to ancient times where writing wasn’t common and very few people knew how to. Yet oral storytelling was a universal language. Philosophy, knowledge, myth, superstition and religious beliefs were passed down through storytelling (Kent, 2015). In today’s world, storytelling is used as a framework for non-profit organizations to convey the organizations impact, engage the public, and call individuals to actions (Bublitz, 2016). It also helps propel the brand, identity, and reputation. Regarding organizations’ purpose, storytelling can illustrate the reason and meaning for their existence (Dixon, 2014, p. 6). It turns facts and numbers into an emotional and compelling message to the public. Storytelling can also serve as an emotional snapshot of how the organization has helped impacted people’s lives before, during, and after (Dixon, 2014)

Income Risk and Aggregate Demand over the Business Cycle

This dissertation consists of three essays on income risk and aggregate demand over the business cycle, each addressing an aspect of the Great Recession. The first chapter reframes the standard liquidity trap model to illustrate the costly feedback loop between idiosyncratic risk and aggregate demand. I first show that a liquidity trap can result from excess demand for precautionary savings in times of high uncertainty. Second, I show that the output and welfare costs of the ensuing recession depend crucially on how the drop in demand for output is translated into a reduction in demand for labor. Increased unemployment risk compounds the original rise in idiosyncratic productivity risk and reinforces precautionary motives, deepening the recession. Third, I show that increasing social insurance can raise output and welfare at the zero bound. I decompose these effects to distinguish the component unique to the liquidity trap environment and show that social insurance is most effective at the zero bound when it targets the type of idiosyncratic risk households face, which in turns depends on the labor market adjustment mechanism. The second paper offers a novel model of the connection between the consumer credit and home mortgage markets through an individual’s credit history. This paper introduces a novel justification for the home mortgage interest deduction. In an economy with both housing assets and consumer credit, the mortgage interest deduction is modeled as a subsidy for the accumulation of collateralizable assets by households who have maintained good credit. As such, the subsidy loosens participation constraints and facilitates risk-sharing. Empirical evidence and a calibration exercise reveal that the subsidy has a sizable impact on the availability of credit. The third paper assesses the role of policy uncertainty in the Great Recession. The Great Recession features substantial geographic variation in employment losses, a fact that is often presented as a challenge to uncertainty-based models of the downturn. In this paper we show that there is a substantial correlation between the distribution of employment losses and the increases in local measures of both economic and policy uncertainty. This relationship is robust across a wide range of measures.Economic

Hierarchical Form In Prokofiev’s Flute Sonata Op. 94, II. Scherzo

When Prokofiev wrote the Flute Sonata Op. 94, Soviet composers were torn between their own artistic styles and the need to conform to the ideals of “soviet realism.” In the second movement of the flute sonata, Prokofiev alternates between his own style of composition and the “soviet realism” style. The displaced chromaticism throughout the piece, although adopted by other Soviet composers of this period, is representative of Prokofiev’s individual style. Within this movement, Prokofiev uses form as a basis for making distinction between harmonic ambiguity and stability, motivic repetition and lyricism, and phrase expansion and phrase regularity. Although the form of this movement is traditional in its harmonic relationship and small and large-scale structures, Prokofiev uses the form in a way that facilitates his relationship between his own compositional desires and the political constraints of the Soviet style