Towards Civic Brutalism

1960s Massachusetts was a Brutalist mecca, much of it with civic dimensions, mediating through architecture citizens\u27 rights and identities. The expanded welfare state\u27s administration in Massachusetts was consolidated in new buildings for federal, state, and municipal workers in Boston\u27s Government Center, a top-down urban renewal process. Government Center\u27s buildings, including Boston City Hall and the Massachusetts State Service Center, embodied Brutalist values of material integrity, monumentality, and abstraction. Little thought was given to the architecture\u27s civic dimensions, how people would engage politically with each other and the state. Subsequently, City Hall Plaza functioned for decades as eastern Massachusetts\u27 civic fairground, while also increasingly commercialized, rented for corporate events. Part of the State Service Center is presently being privatized for commercial development. And City Hall Plaza is being renovated from a regional fairground into a neighborhood park. Where does this Government Center civic Brutalism story lead us Moving Forward with UMass? Perhaps towards advocating for the continued public character of civic Brutalism against its privatization and domestication, and for architectural designs and processes to activate a an inclusive, empowered democratic citizenry, as it works, resides, and is educated

Approaches to decision-making among late-stage melanoma patients: a multifactorial investigation.

PurposeThe treatment decisions of melanoma patients are poorly understood. Most research on cancer patient decision-making focuses on limited components of specific treatment decisions. This study aimed to holistically characterize late-stage melanoma patients' approaches to treatment decision-making in order to advance understanding of patient influences and supports.Methods(1) Exploratory analysis of longitudinal qualitative data to identify themes that characterize patient decision-making. (2) Pattern analysis of decision-making themes using an innovative method for visualizing qualitative data: a hierarchically-clustered heatmap. Participants were 13 advanced melanoma patients at a large academic medical center.ResultsExploratory analysis revealed eight themes. Heatmap analysis indicated two broad types of patient decision-makers. "Reliant outsiders" relied on providers for medical information, demonstrated low involvement in decision-making, showed a low or later-in-care interest in clinical trials, and expressed altruistic motives. "Active insiders" accessed substantial medical information and expertise in their networks, consulted with other doctors, showed early and substantial interest in trials, demonstrated high involvement in decision-making, and employed multiple decision-making strategies.ConclusionWe identified and characterized two distinct approaches to decision-making among patients with late-stage melanoma. These differences spanned a wide range of factors (e.g., behaviors, resources, motivations). Enhanced understanding of patients as decision-makers and the factors that shape their decision-making may help providers to better support patient understanding, improve patient-provider communication, and support shared decision-making

Inventing the Economy Or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the GDP.

What is the economy? Recent scholarship has demonstrated that “the economy” is a relatively new feature of economic discourse. Before 1930, economists theorized and measured markets, trade, inequality, and more, but did not bundle these objects together into a unified whole named “the economy.” This dissertation offers a “formation story” for the economy, tracing the messy assemblages that constituted the economy and the consequences that flowed from the particular shape it took. Using a variety of historical data, I argue that the production of official, routine, timely macroeconomic statistics transformed the fuzzy conceptual space of “economic life” into a sociotechnical object, “the economy” in the 1930s and 1940s. I focus especially on national income statistics (GNP, GDP) as a key practice that enacted the economy as an object with a precisely-defined boundary and size. This dissertation contributes to research on the performativity of economics and the political power of economic expertise. I show how economists constructed “regimes of perceptibility” that focused attention on economic growth, and away from income and wealth inequality, which contributed to academics and policymakers overlooking increasing inequality. Similarly, macroeconomic statistics ignored unpaid housework, and thus defined much of women’s labor outside of the economy. The macroeconomic regime of perceptibility made visible small economic fluctuations that were invisible in earlier eras. This visibility made possible a new political rationality, “managing the economy,” which allowed policymakers to act on economic aggregates rather than individual industries or markets, while simultaneously obligating them to account for small deviations from precisely defined goals. Economic experts thus reshaped political dynamics by constructing new objects of governance and, in so doing, reshaping the capacities and obligations of the state.PHDSociologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120713/1/dandanar_1.pd