Hecho en South Carolina: K-12 Latinx Educators Made in, and Remaking, El Sur Latinx

While there are burgeoning, and separate, lines of research about the shifting demographics of Latinx in the U.S South generally, as well a lack of diverse teacher representation nationally, there remains a dearth of research on how these two phenomenon intersect. This dissertation centers post-structural understandings of subjectivity and relational space with a qualitative social-spatial methodology to investigate how Latinx educators in South Carolina produce, affirm, reconstitute, refuse, and disrupt the social spatial relations that mark the boundaries of their subjectivities. I conducted interviews, photovoice, and (eco)maps with 25 Latinx K-12 educators in South Carolina to collect data and create narrative cartographies of Latinx educators which I used to demonstrate my findings. The narrative cartographies worked to map the shifting, contingent, and fluid subjectivities and spaces of Latinx K-12 educators in South Carolina and illuminate a multiplicity of centers, a variety of entry points, to challenge practices that marginalize and exploit as well as highlight the ingenuity and creativity of educators’ own solutions to establish other spaces, other relations, other lines of flight to become otherwise, and to make possible the previously unthought. I argue that Latinx educators, even though naming their spaces as hostile, express concurrent in/exclusion, detailing multiplicity rather than dichotomy. Such relations of in/exclusion are (inter)dependent on the spaces, the sets of relations, Latinx educators find themselves in. Although I outline a number of subject positions, such as “professional,” “international teacher,” “Maestra,” “culturaambassador,” “role model,” and “unicorn” that Latinx educators (co)construct, (co)maintain, (co)legitimize, and (co)resist in South Carolina, most important is how such subjectivities are fluid, contingent, and locally negotiated. Latinx educator subjectivities are neither free from nor external to, but rather co-constitutive of knowledge/power discourse about both Latinx and educators that is used, internalized, refused and/or hailed by/within different sets of relations (spaces). Thus, it is vital to reject notions about both a static, timeless South, and a static, timeless Latinx teacher, to allow for more just spaces of becoming (the self). For Latinx educators and El Sur Latinx are more than containers for singular stories of temporality, bodies toward predestined being(s); but instead the products, the becomings, of countless relations, intra-actions, and meeting points

Book Review

Mistakes We Have Made: Implications for Social Justice Educator

p3d: a general data-reduction tool for fiber-fed integral-field spectrographs

The reduction of integral-field spectrograph (IFS) data is demanding work. Many repetitive operations are required in order to convert raw data into, typically a large number of, spectra. This effort can be markedly simplified through the use of a tool or pipeline, which is designed to complete many of the repetitive operations without human interaction. Here we present our semi-automatic data-reduction tool p3d that is designed to be used with fiber-fed IFSs. Important components of p3d include a novel algorithm for automatic finding and tracing of spectra on the detector, and two methods of optimal spectrum extraction in addition to standard aperture extraction. p3d also provides tools to combine several images, perform wavelength calibration and flat field data. p3d is at the moment configured for four IFSs. In order to evaluate its performance we have tested the different components of the tool. For these tests we used both simulated and observational data. We demonstrate that for three of the IFSs a correction for so-called cross-talk due to overlapping spectra on the detector is required. Without such a correction spectra will be inaccurate, in particular if there is a significant intensity gradient across the object. Our tests showed that p3d is able to produce accurate results. p3d is a highly general and freely available tool. It is easily extended to include improved algorithms, new visualization tools and support for additional instruments. The program code can be downloaded from the p3d-project web site http://p3d.sourceforge.netComment: 18 pages, 15 figures, 3 tables, accepted for publication in A&

Detection and Mapping of Decoupled Stellar and Ionized Gas Structures in the Ultraluminous Infrared Galaxy IRAS 12112+0305

Integral field optical spectroscopy with the INTEGRAL fiber-fed system and HST optical imaging are used to map the complex stellar and warm ionized gas structure in the ultraluminous infrared galaxy IRAS 12112+0305. Images reconstructed from wavelength-delimited extractions of the integral field spectra reveal that the observed ionized gas distribution is decoupled from the stellar main body of the galaxy, with the dominant continuum and emission-line regions separated by projected distances of up to 7.5 kpc. The two optical nuclei are detected as apparently faint emission-line regions, and their optical properties are consistent with being dust-enshrouded weak-[OI] LINERs. The brightest emission-line region is associated with a faint (m_{I}= 20.4), giant HII region of 600 pc diameter, where a young (about 5 Myr) massive cluster of about 2 $\times$ 10$^7$ $M_{\odot}$ dominates the ionization. Internal reddening towards the line-emitting regions and the optical nuclei ranges from 1 to 8 magnitudes, in the visual. Taken the reddening into aacount, the overall star formation in IRAS 12112+0305 is dominated by starbursts associated with the two nuclei and corresponding to a star formation rate of 80 $M_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$.Comment: 2 figures, accepted to Ap.J. Letter

Synthesis and Characterization of Three-Coordinate Ni(III)-Imide Complexes

A new family of low-coordinate nickel imides supported by 1,2-bis(di-tert-butylphosphino)ethane was synthesized. Oxidation of nickel(II) complexes led to the formation of both aryl- and alkyl-substituted nickel(III)-imides, and examples of both types have been isolated and fully characterized. The aryl substituent that proved most useful in stabilizing the Ni(III)-imide moiety was the bulky 2,6-dimesitylphenyl. The two Ni(III)-imide compounds showed different variable-temperature magnetic properties but analogous EPR spectra at low temperatures. To account for this discrepancy, a low-spin/high-spin equilibrium was proposed to take place for the alkyl-substituted Ni(III)-imide complex. This proposal was supported by DFT calculations. DFT calculations also indicated that the unpaired electron is mostly localized on the imide nitrogen for the Ni(III) complexes. The results of reactions carried out in the presence of hydrogen donors supported the findings from DFT calculations that the adamantyl substituent was a significantly more reactive hydrogen-atom abstractor. Interestingly, the steric properties of the 2,6-dimesitylphenyl substituent are important not only in protecting the Ni═N core but also in favoring one rotamer of the resulting Ni(III)-imide, by locking the phenyl ring in a perpendicular orientation with respect to the NiPP plane