Sociologists Without Borders and The Meaning of “Without Borders”: The Social Construction of Organizational and Scholarly Boundaries

This manuscript examines what it means to be “without borders” in an organizational and scholarly context

INVENTORS BEWARE: THE DANGER OF GETTING TOO MANY PATENTS

INVENTORS BEWARE: THE DANGER OF GETTING TOO MANY PATENT

Rules vs. Rights? Social Control, Dignity, and the Right to Housing in the Shelter System

Sometimes the mechanisms that are in place to protect human rights lead to human rights violations. Drawing on data from ten months of fieldwork at a homeless shelter’s women’s program in a New England city. The authors trace the compromise of human dignity that accompanies one shelter’s effort to help clients fulfill their human right to housing

Rules vs. Rights? Social Control, Dignity, and the Right to Housing in the Shelter System

Sometimes the mechanisms that are in place to protect human rights lead to human rights violations. Drawing on data from ten months of fieldwork at a homeless shelter’s women’s program in a New England city. The authors trace the compromise of human dignity that accompanies one shelter’s effort to help clients fulfill their human right to housing

The State, the UDHR, and the Social Construction of Family in Human Rights: The Case of the Scarborough 11

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (UN 1947:34) declares in Article 16(3) that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to the full protection by society and the state.” However, the UDHR does not define family, but rather presumes it is defined by traditional heteronormative marriage in a nuclear family. The failure of the UDHR to consider a more expansive view of family leaves the definition of family centrally in the hands of the state, and affects the ability of all but traditional nuclear family forms to access other human rights. We add to the scholarship on the role of the state in defining and maintaining family and family inequality through an examination of the case of the Scarborough 11, an intentional family sued by the city of Hartford, CT for violations of residential zoning ordinance based on family. This case challenges hegemonic constructions of family and illustrates the limits of the UDHR to protect all families. The case demonstrates the importance of the related questions: 1) how legal definitions of family create the capacity for local residents to understand non-nuclear families living among them, 2) whether the end-goal of this problem should be to expand the state’s definition of family or remove that power from the state in total (a question of reform vs. abolition) and, 3) what might a case concerning white middle-class professionals’ struggles to thrive tell us about boundary maintenance and the struggles of the poor to survive

The Reproductive Body: Exploring Reproduction Beyond Gender

Most of us have been taught over the course of our lives that biological sex, gender, and reproduction are inescapably linked and, over time, this has created the illusion that these are all naturally connected. However, these “natural” connections have been formed over time after generations of repetition. While it may seem impossible to separate biological sex, gender, and reproduction from one another, it is important to deconstruct this falsely organic system from both a gender and human rights perspective. This thesis seeks to explore the complex relationship between society’s reproductive mandate and the reality of the various processes of reproduction in relationship with gender. While society, on paper, simply demands that everyone reproduce, the truth is that society only wants a certain subset of people to do so — those who are heterosexual, cisgender, and behave in conventionally gendered ways. This thesis further examines the gender and biological essentialism inherent in society’s reproductive mandate and explores this mandate in relationship with trans* reproduction, noting that there are certain standards to which trans* individuals are held in order for their gender to be deemed authentic that cis* individuals are not

Session 11: \u3cem\u3eCan machine learning predict particle deposition at specific intranasal regions based on computational fluid dynamics inputs/outputs and nasal geometry measurements?\u3c/em\u3e

Along with machine learning modeling, numerical simulations of respiratory airflow and particle transport can be used to improve targeted deposition at the upper respiratory infection site of numerous airborne diseases. Given the need for more patient data from varied demographics, we propose a machine learning-enabled protocol for determining optimal formulation design parameters that may match nasal spray device settings for successful drug delivery. We measured 11 anatomical parameters (including nasopharyngeal volume, nostril heights, and mid-nasal cavity volume) for 10 CT-based nasal geometries representative of the population for this aim. We also ran 160 computational fluid dynamics simulations of drug delivery on the same geometries for various breathing situations, using varied pressure gradients to drive inhaled air transport to evaluate drug deposition at the various upper airway areas for nasal inhalers. Using this test data, we constructed 18 machine-learning models to estimate the targeted deposition at the different regions of the upper airway. This study contributes to developing a customized, efficient intranasal delivery system for prophylactics, treatments, and immunizations; the findings will apply to a broad spectrum of respiratory disorders