The Social Life of Human Capital: The Rise of Social Economy, Entrepreneurial Subject, and Neosocial Government in South Korea

This dissertation explores the rise of social economy in South Korea, in order to understand the transformations of sociality, ethicality, and subjectivity in the contemporary capitalism. In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, we have witnessed “the return of the social” through introduction of various socio-economic projects—such as social economy, social innovation, and social entrepreneurship—that aim to graft morality and sociality onto the market. In the last decade, South Korea’s social economy sector has also grown quickly with the active support and promotion by the government, representing a new model of development as well as a feasible solution to reproduction crisis. This rapid growth has generated public and academic debates over whether the returned “socials” are the seeds of post-neoliberalism or just an ideological cloak for the expansion of market rationality. Based on ethnographic research on the social economy sector in Seoul, this dissertation focuses on an often-neglected question in these debates: what forms of the social imaginary, knowledge, subjectivity, and ethicality have emerged in the new “socials” as a result of the imbrication of moral aspirations with the neoliberal human condition? To address the question, I first demonstrate how contemporary neoliberalism presupposes a new form of homo œconomicus, human capital, who is expected to manage all the aspects of life within a single value frame, acting as a “portfolio manager.” As the new subjectivity incorporates non-economic elements—including social logics and moral orientations—as assets that can be translated into economic value, the responsibilities for society and the construction of social bonds are directly devolved on the new economic subjects. This dissertation goes on to show how the financial logic of human capital has conditioned and created a new sociality and ethicality. In examining the various fields from community development through the social care market to fair trade activism, I trace how community, care, affective labor, and ethical practices have been intermingled and articulated with the new form of economic rationality and have contributed to the economization of sociality and ethicality. Notions such as “enterprization of community,” “projective ethicality,” “affective labor (hwaldong),” and “marketized gift-exchange” are discussed to flesh out the transformation and articulation more clearly. Finally, this thesis conceptualizes the dynamics of the new subjectivity, ethicality, and social imaginary in terms of “neosocial government,” in which the crisis of the neoliberal human capital regime is managed and addressed through social ties based on care, affective labor, and gift. In unveiling how the new governing rationality prioritizes and reifies intimate social bonds over political engagement and structural transformation, this dissertation not only illuminates the depoliticized aspects of the newly returned socials but also highlights the necessity of reinventing a universal vision of politics upon which the broken link between social solidarity and politics can be restored

Spin torques and anomalous velocity in spin textures induced by fast electron injection from topological ferromagnets: The role of gauge fields

A new method for analysing magnetization dynamics in spin textures under the influence of fast electron injection from topological ferromagnetic sources such as Dirac half metals has been proposed. These electrons, traveling at a velocity $v$ with a non-negligible value of $v/c$ (where c is the speed of light), generate a non-equilibrium magnetization density in the spin-texture region, which is related to an electric dipole moment via relativistic interactions. When this resulting dipole moment interacts with gauge fields in the spin-texture region, an effective field is created that produces spin torques. These torques, like spin-orbit torques that occur when electrons are injected from a heavy metal into a ferromagnet, can display both damping-like and anti-damping-like properties. Finally, we demonstrate that such an interaction between the dipole moment and the gauge field introduces an anomalous velocity that can contribute to transverse electrical conductivity in the spin texture in a way comparable to the topological Hall effect

Design of Cognitive Rehabilitation Training System using Artificial Intelligence

This study is a study to design a cognitive(dementia) rehabilitation training system using the MMSE-DS protocol and the GDS protocol using artificial intelligence to analyze the user's cognitive ability and infer cognitive domain content correlation inference algorithms. For research on cognitive judgment technology using artificial intelligence, We provide an integrated cognitive rehabilitation service platform, provide customized training content by building a cognitive rehabilitation evaluation and training user data storage and analysis database, and design an algorithm to help improve users' learning ability by building an artificial intelligence system. The user's cognitive ability analysis and cognitive domain content inference algorithm using artificial intelligence is the purpose is to design a cognitive judgment platform and implement a system to apply cognitive evaluation to people with mild cognitive impairment and utilize cognitive rehabilitation content based on cognitive judgment technology system design technology. Through this study, we aim to provide direction for the future field of cognitive rehabilitation combined with artificial intelligenc

Knowledge-based Methods for Integrating Carbon Footprint Prediction Techniques into New Product Designs and Engineering Changes.

This dissertation presents research focusing on the development of knowledge-based techniques of assessing the carbon footprint during new product creation. This research aims to transform the current time-consuming, off-line and reactive approach into an integrated proactive approach that relies on using fast estimates of sustainability generated from past computations on similar products. The developed methods address multiple challenges by leveraging the latest advancements in open standards and software capabilities from machine learning and data mining to support integration and early decision-making using generic knowledge of the product development field. Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA)-based carbon footprint calculation typically starts by analyzing the product functions. However, the lack of a semantically correct formal representation of product functions is a barrier to their effective capture and reuse. We first identified the advanced semantics that must be captured to ensure appropriate usability for reasoning with product functions. We captured them into a Function Semantics Representation that relies on the Semantic Web Rule Language, a proposed Semantic Web standard, to overcome limitations posed due to the commonly used Web Ontology Language. Several products are developed as Engineering Changes (ECs) of previous products but there is not enough data to predict the carbon footprint available before their implementation. In order to use past EC knowledge to predict for this purpose, we proposed an approach to compute similarity between ECs that overcame the challenge of the hierarchical nature of product knowledge by integrating an approach inspired from research in psychology with semantics specific to product development. We embedded this into a parallelized Ant-Colony based clustering algorithm for faster retrieval of a group of similar ECs. We are not aware of approaches to predict the carbon footprint of an EC or a proposed design right after the proposal. In order to reuse carbon footprint information from past designs and engineering changes, key parameters were determined to represent lifecycle attributes. The carbon footprint is predicted through a surrogate LCA technique developed using case-based reasoning and boosted-learning.Ph.D.Mechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/78846/1/scyang_1.pd