ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst

Recent Submissions

  • Publication
    Sensemaking and Sustainability: A Sensemaking Perspective on the Ethical Use of Big Data in Marketing Strategizing
    (2024-11) Wang, Emma (Junhong); Berthon, Pierre; Su, Yiran
    Despite the ethical concerns over the datafication and surveillance of individuals and groups, companies are making ever greater investments in big data. The assumptions underpinning this movement are: (1) organizations are passive implementers of big data—more data is the inevitable consequence of technology and a competitive necessity for business, (2) more data offers a more objective and accurate picture of reality and (3) more data enables better prediction. We argue that this perspective is strategically unsustainable and abdicates ethical responsibility. In this chapter, we adopt a sensemaking perspective (Weick in (1995) Sensemaking in organizationsto challenge each of the assumptions of inevitability, objectivity, and predictability. Building on this critique, we discuss the role that organizations can play in creating alternative sustainable futures with big data and explore the legal and ethical consequences of their actions. In addition, we advocate that, from a sensemaking perspective, organizations can use big data to cultivate sustainable learning and innovating communities of both employees and customers
  • Publication
    Linguistic Racism and Racialization on Social Media. The Case of (Mock) Kichwa
    (2024-09) Narváez Burbano, María Daniela
    This dissertation examines the phenomenon of Mock Kichwa in memes shared on social media in Ecuador, focusing on how these memes contribute to racism and reflect enduring colonial raciolinguistic ideologies. Ecuador is a multilingual society where Spanish is the dominant language, and Kichwa is the most widely spoken Indigenous language in the Highlands. Due to centuries of contact between Spanish and Kichwa, there exists a continuum of Ecuadorian Andean Spanish (EAS) varieties, some of which are stigmatized and mocked, particularly by the white-mestizo population. This study investigates the linguistic and semiotic strategies used in these memes, exploring how both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people perceive them, while highlighting Ecuador's distinct sociopolitical dynamics and racial constructs, such as mestizaje and indigeneity, which shape these perceptions. Building on the concept of Mock Spanish (Hill, 1995) and raciolinguistic ideologies (Rosa and Flores, 2017), which link seemingly "innocent" or humorous practices to underlying beliefs about language, race, and class, this research extends these frameworks to the context of Latin America. By analyzing a corpus of 50 memes collected between 2020 and 2024, and incorporating ethnographic data from questionnaires and focus groups, this dissertation reveals that Mock Kichwa relies heavily on stigmatized linguistic features of EAS. These features include vowel neutralization, the representation of /ʃ/ as "sh" instead of "ll," the assibilation of the rhotic sounds /r/ and /ɾ/, the use of Kichwa words with negative connotations in EAS, and the hyper-use of EAS morphosyntactic features. The study employs diverse community-based and decolonial methodologies, such as multimodal semiotic analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis, and focus groups, to understand how language and race are co-constructed in these digital spaces and subsequently experienced in other contexts. Memes are analyzed as "semiotic packages" that combine linguistic and non-linguistic elements, serving as key indexes of social meaning. By utilizing the concept of "indexicality," this dissertation moves beyond a focus solely on mock languages, instead reflecting the diverse indexing practices that characterize the construction of Mock Kichwa and, more importantly, the underlying language ideologies that perpetuate social inequity. The findings highlight how Mock Kichwa in social media memes perpetuates social hierarchies and racist ideologies, continuing the marginalization of Indigenous communities. These memes are not merely playful or humorous; they serve as tools of power and control that reinforce existing social structures. This dissertation also underscores the ongoing resistance and contestation by Indigenous peoples, who continuously challenge racism and colonial legacies, leading to unique forms of resistance and language revitalization.
  • Publication
    Essays on Social Reproduction, Distribution, and the Political Economy of Paid and Unpaid Work in Selected Latin American Countries
    (2024-09) Maqueira Linares, Anamary
    This dissertation comprises three essays that contribute to the social reproduction literature by using it as a framework to analyze Global South and “in transition” contexts while inquiring on the role of the state in shaping and directly contributing to social reproduction processes. Chapter 1 uses time-use data to explore the relationship between institutional and non-parental childcare provision on maternal unpaid time use in Ecuador. Results suggest that institutional and kinship childcare presents a complementary relationship for mothers’ active unpaid care time, while female kinship is associated with significant reductions in maternal time regarding supervisory childcare and housework. The size of the effects suggests that out-of-home childcare is associated with greater reductions for mothers with no co-resident adult female kin. Chapter 2, co-authored with Katherine Moos, proposes an accounting framework for understanding the distributional role of household production, employment, remittances, and government social transfers in the social reproduction of the Cuban people, and provide a snapshot for 2016. Our findings demonstrate that households were viii the largest contributors to social reproduction in Cuba. Our empirical exercise reveals how the actual distributional arrangements underlying Cuban social reproduction differ from the official commitments and goals of the Cuban Revolution. The relative contributions in 2016 signal several potentially unsustainable self-reinforcing dynamics that undermine efforts to achieve gender and racial equality on the Island. Chapter 3 asks how the economic and social reform processes of the post-2010s Cuba have redistributed the costs of social reproduction among the State, the market, and the family, particularly regarding the caring of dependents. I examine the transformations in unpaid and paid work, government benefits, and remittances using legal and policy changes and their implementation. Results demonstrate that the reproductive bargain in post-2010s Cuba has explicitly changed, acquiring a transnational dimension. The analysis shows that the reform policies have shifted the responsibilities of social reproduction more onto households and that increasing commodification of social reproduction processes has occurred, with adverse consequences for women. De-statization processes have followed as a combination of direct withdrawal of the government’s role as a social provider and less state presence in other socio-economic affairs.
  • Publication
    Developing Digital Biomarkers of Early Childhood Mental Health using Multimodal Sensor Data
    (2024-09) Kalanadhabhatta, Manasa
    Pediatric mental health is a growing concern around the world, with mental, emotional, and behavioral disorders affecting children's social-emotional development and increasing the risk of adverse behavioral outcomes later in life. However, diagnosing mental health disorders in early childhood remains challenging. Caregivers are often unable to accurately identify signs of problematic behavior, and many lack access to specialized screening services. Digital biomarkers from passively sensed signals collected using smartphones and wearable devices have shown remarkable promise for mental health screening at scale. Nevertheless, such digital mental health tools are yet to make a significant mark in pediatric settings. While this may partly be driven by caregivers' perspectives toward such tools, the fact that children rarely tend to be independent users of mobile and wearable devices is also a key deterrent to developing scalable digital biomarkers of mental health in younger populations. In this thesis, I attempt to bridge this pediatric mental health diagnosis gap by developing novel digital tools that enable screening for problem behaviors in a convenient and scalable manner. These screening tools leverage multimodal signals that can be recorded using ubiquitous devices in the home while children are engaged in brief, clinically validated play-based interactions. I establish the technical feasibility of developing machine learning models to detect interaction-based biomarkers of attention-deficit/hyperactivity, disruptive behavior, and other externalizing disorders using behavioral (audio, video) and physiological (heart rate, electrodermal activity) signals. I incorporate these biomarkers into three new home-based assessments that can be realized using off-the-shelf mobile and wearable devices to predict not just behavioral symptoms but also their neurophysiological underpinnings, thus providing richer insight into the trajectories of early problem behaviors. To facilitate the integration of these next-generation screening tools into existing mental healthcare ecosystems, I further outline design recommendations for such tools by distilling findings from stakeholder studies involving parents and child mental health practitioners. This work thus sets the stage for ubiquitous technologies that can obtain rich, multidimensional data in the wild and enable screening for early childhood mental health concerns at scale.
  • Publication
    Stored Multiword Representations and their Usage during Chinese Reading
    (2024-09) Huang, Kuan-Jung
    What are the building blocks of language stored in memory and how are they utilized in linguistic tasks? It has been proposed that meaningful strings of all lengths—morphemes, words, and sequences of multiple words—can be stored, with the last kind playing a crucial role in language processing. This dissertation investigates the existence of stored multiword representations and their usage in Chinese reading. Stored multiword representations are operationalized by using two words that frequently co-occur and comparing them with those that do not. Morphosyntactic structure is also manipulated, with the main comparison between noun-noun and verb-object sequences. Two tasks are used to study visual recognition of multiword sequences: (1) a rapid masked visual presentation without sentence context probes how many words in a string can be simultaneously recognized and whether this limit is modulated by the co-occurrence frequency of the two words in the string; (2) a naturalistic sentence reading task with a gaze-contingent boundary change paradigm probes how far/deep Chinese ix readers process downstream text not yet directly fixated (i.e., parafoveal processing) and whether this limit is modulated by the co-occurrence frequency of the two words in the downstream string. The results show that co-occurrence frequency facilitates rapid visual recognition without sentence context, making parallel recognition of the two embedded words possible. This is the case for both noun-noun and verb-object sequences. In sentence reading, however, co-occurrence frequency influences online processing differently for strings of different structures. It facilitates processing extremely early on for noun-noun sequences: readers process Characters n+3 and n+4 in the parafovea beyond the visuo-orthographical level, while no such evidence is found for verb-object sequences. However, relatively late foveal processing does appear to be facilitated by co-occurrence frequency, for both kinds. Based on the findings, I argue that while language users are highly sensitive to statistical regularities of word sequences of various structures, this possibly yields only familiarity with the surface multiword forms and ease of on-the-fly composition of the two embedded words for verb-object sequences. Compound nouns on the other hand may be lexically stored to have direct form-meaning mapping via frequent exposure, hence the additional early facilitation observed. Future models of Chinese reading must incorporate mechanisms to explain the current data: (1) extremely fast access to frequently co-occurring strings’ orthography, which suggests that a single decomposition route alone is likely insufficient; (2) distinctive processing patterns throughout the time course between noun-noun and verb-object sequences, which points toward structural/semantic composition in addition to utilization of word statistics and contextual probability.

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