Organizing (Eternal) Identity and Identification: An Upward Glance into Religious Institutions

This dissertation disrupts at least two religious spaces: First, scholars religiously adhering to (social) scientific norms, and second, people identifying with religious organizations (i.e., churches). First, we begin constructing a theoretical lens using poststructural ideas offered by Foucault, Derrida, and Bakhtin to read and disrupt (religious) discourse. Second, we complicate organizational identification as a concept, deeming it fixed and fluid—a paradox within religious discourses that endorse Truth and Perfection. Here, we draw from the communication constitutes organization (CCO) approach. Third, we further curate the lens by applying poststructuralism, identification, and CCO in a specific context: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (The Church). Doing so enables Restorationism—a fixed-fluid theoretical technique for scrutinizing identification paradoxes in religious spaces. Fourth, we try Restorationism on 89 addresses to reveal contradictions of organizational identification within The Church, followed by discussions of the (dis)organizing effect of language, including Scripture, on identity. Throughout the dissertation, we challenge (social) scientific norms—faithful to postmodernism—through performance techniques, including poetry, courtroom scenes, images, metaphors, and embodied discussions. Doing so, along with speculations on (religious organizational) identification, rouses at least three questions, including (1) who am I; (2) where did I come from; and (3) where am I going

How Do Adolescents Spell Time Use?

We investigate how household disadvantage affects the time use of 15-18 year-olds using 2003-2006 data from the American Time Use Survey. Applying competing-risk hazard models, we distinguish between the incidence and duration of activities and incorporate the daily time constraint. We find that teens living in disadvantaged households spend less time in non-classroom schooling activities than other teens. Girls spend some of this time in work activities, suggesting they are taking on adult roles. However we find more evidence of substitution into unsupervised activities, suggesting that it may be less structured environments that reduce educational investment.event history models, adolescence, time use

"Parental Child Care in Single Parent, Cohabiting, and Married Couple Families: Time Diary Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom"

This study uses time diary data from the 2003 American Time Use Survey and the United Kingdom Time Use Survey 2000 to examine the time that single, cohabiting, and married parents devote to caring for their children. Time spent in market work, in child care as a primary activity, and in child care as a passive activity are jointly modeled using a correlated, censored regression model. Separate estimates are provided by gender, by country, and by weekend/weekday day. We find no evidence that these time allocation decisions differ for cohabiting and married parents, but there is evidence that single persons allocate time differently - as might be expected, given different household time constraints. In the U.S. single fathers spend significantly more time in primary child care on weekdays and substantially less time in passive child care on weekends than their married or cohabiting counterparts, while in the UK single fathers spend significantly more time in passive child care on weekdays. Single fathers in each country report less time at work on weekdays than their married or cohabiting counterparts. In the U.S., single mothers work more than married or cohabiting mothers on weekdays, while single mothers in the United Kingdom work less than married or cohabiting mothers on all days.

How do Adolescents Spell Time Use?

We investigate how household disadvantage affects the time use of 15-18 year-olds using 2003- 2006 data from the American Time Use Survey. Applying competing-risk hazard models, we distinguish between the incidence and duration of activities and incorporate the daily time constraint. We find that teens living in disadvantaged households spend less time in nonclassroom schooling activities than other teens. Girls spend some of this time in work activities, suggesting they are taking on adult roles. However we find more evidence of substitution into unsupervised activities, suggesting that it may be less structured environments that reduce educational investment.Time use, adolescence, event history models

A single structured light beam as an atomic cloud splitter

We propose a scheme to split a cloud of cold non-interacting neutral atoms based on their dipole interaction with a single structured light beam which exhibits parabolic cylindrical symmetry. Using semiclassical numerical simulations, we establish a direct relationship between the general properties of the light beam and the relevant geometric and kinematic properties acquired by the atomic cloud as its passes through the beam.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure

Subtleties on energy calculations in the image method

In this pedagogical work we point out a subtle mistake that can be done by undergraduate or graduate students in the computation of the electrostatic energy of a system containing charges and perfect conductors if they naively use the image method. Specifically, we show that the naive expressions for the electrostatic energy for these systems obtained directly from the image method are wrong by a factor 1/2. We start our discussion with well known examples, namely, point charge-perfectly conducting wall and point charge-perfectly conducting sphere and then proceed to the demonstration of general results, valid for conductors of arbitrary shapes.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures; Major change in this version: subsection added to Sect.4 (theorem generalization). Minor changes: title replaced; corrections to the English; some explanatory comments adde