In Culture and Imperialism, Said illustrates that we have no "autonomous cultural forms," but rather "impure" ones that are the products of historically "discrepant experiences." American culture has an interesting relationship with the history of imperialism. The Europeans that settled the U.S. imported slave labor to assist in the growth...
In this creative non-fiction thesis, I present a collection of personal essays that examine my significant moments of awkwardness with failed communications or frustrated relationships when I wanted to draw people closer with language, but was unsuccessful. In the twelve stories, I discuss these issues in my interpersonal communication interwoven...
The online computer science classroom is growing, but there is little research on how to teach inclusive design online. As a result, online CS students are graduating without learning how to avoid bias in their software designs. Through the lens of the Inclusive Design Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), this thesis...
East Palo Alto is a small working-class community of color in the San Francisco Bay Area. Though the community has rich agrarian roots, fertile soil, and good weather, racially-charged policies have influenced East Palo Alto’s development and significantly impacted the state of natural resources in the city in stark contrast...
Chainsaws serve as one of the primary tools used by logging corporations, ranches, and farms for forestry management. Lubricating oil remains one of the heaviest operational expenditures for chainsaws. This largely in part due to chainsaw lubrication being a total loss system in which nearly all lubricating oil applied is...
Background: Although some previous research has found ways to find inclusivity bugs (biases in software that introduce inequities among cognitively diverse individuals), little attention has been paid to how to go about fixing such bugs. We hypothesized that Information Architecture (IA)--the way information is organized, structured and labeled--may provide the...
A recipe as a piece of text can tell a variety of stories as well as any other. Using a feminist rhetorical analysis, I read my grandmother’s personal recipe journal to show that her writings contain valuable information about women’s lives in twentieth century Poland. Through the close examination of...
In this paper I discuss an ethnographic research project on identity embodiment among transgender and gender nonconforming punks in the Pacific Northwest region of the U.S., with focus on the relationship between transgender/gender nonconforming identity and affiliation to DIY punk communities. Trans punks create a unique, hybridized subculture-based identity embodiment...