ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst
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Recent Submissions
Publication Investigating the Role of Predictive Representations in Implicit Event Boundaries, Statistical Learning, and Categorization(2024-09)We make sense of the world by extracting meaningful information from a continuous sensory stream. Extracting meaningful information involves first segmenting this continuous sensory stream into shorter, processable chunks. These discrete chunks of events represent our recalled experiences and allow us to develop heuristics representing the statistical regularities in our environment. In this dissertation, I present a predictive context representational account of segmenting the continuous sensory stream into smaller chunks. I demonstrate that maintaining a distributed context representation defined by an expectation of upcoming future events and learned through temporal difference learning naturally leads to the separation of temporally disjoint events without perceptually explicit markers. I contrast this predictive, error-driven account of context representation with an associative learning account and provide behavioral evidence in support of the predictive representational account. I then show that such predictive context representations can be used as a common framework to understand higher order cognitive processes of event cognition and categorization. I first assess whether implicitly operationalized event boundaries, where changes in ongoing context that mark boundaries are not perceptually salient, provide the same behavioral properties as explicitly operationalized event boundaries thereby providing evidence for shared representations between the two. Finally, I apply the representational framework to understand the cognitive processes behind implicit category learning. I show that predictive representations can arbitrate category learning via the shared temporal context for items in each category. Work in this dissertation provides a mechanistic account for statistical learning through widely applicable framework of temporal difference learning. I further demonstrate a use of predictive representations as a common framework to understand higher-order cognitive processes such as event cognition, and categorization.Publication The Politics of Redress in Violent Democracies: Exile and Transborder Reparations in Colombia(2024-09)How do democracies embroiled in civil wars grapple with transitional justice to redress transborder forced displacement? What do the forcibly displaced abroad expect from their states of origin under conditions of protracted and ongoing violence? This dissertation studies Colombia’s Victims Law, the most ambitious redress law globally, to prove the paradoxes and possibilities that arise when violent democracies commit to transborder reparations. Bridging the fields of transitional justice, legal studies, diaspora studies, and migrant integration, the dissertation argues that an “excess of law” emerges in response to violence and in efforts to legitimize peace processes, with diverse implications for forcibly displaced populations abroad. This “excess of law” refers to a proliferation of legal norms manifesting through frequent legal reforms, progressive rulings, or redress laws that are ambitious yet often unattainable. Violent democracies provide institutional opportunities, political openings, and incentives to enact such laws as a means of signaling state legitimacy, upholding moral imperatives, and providing mechanisms for the powerless to respond to violence. However, the instrumental efficacy of these laws is frequently undermined by the violence they seek to address. Colombia’s sweeping promise to redress more than 14% of its population, the majority of whom are forcibly displaced, has overwhelmed the state and engendered significant frustration among victims. This situation presents a paradox: The greater the state’s ambition to deliver equitable redress to a vast number of victims, the more it struggles to fulfill its promises. Moreover, the state’s inability to meet its commitments diminishes its capacity to achieve the political objectives of redress. Nevertheless, the dissertation also illustrates that the “excess of law” generates a surplus of meanings that shape new forms of agency. The symbolic dimensions of the Victims Law have enabled the forcibly displaced abroad to mitigate the burdens of alienation, isolation, and precarious belonging that characterize the liminality of exile. My participatory research through photovoice with a diverse group of Colombian exiles in the Unites States also reveals how these symbolic mediations facilitate trust-building among exiles and confront the challenges of integration in host societies when return is unfeasible or undesirable.Publication Investigations on Global Elite Education, A Century of Background Traits of the Board Members, and Culturual Promotion at the Banco De La Republica(2024-09)Elite education is both a cause and a consequence of the pivotal function of elites in society today. Studying elite education from different angles allows analysis of the structures of inequality in society since education plays a role in the reproduction, incorporation, and social formation of elites. The translation of worldviews of elite education into policymaking goes through the reproduction and formation of each new generation of the elite and can also positively or negatively impact social inequalities through policymaking on everything from mass education to interest rates. In this dissertation, I investigate elite education from three different perspectives and pay special attention to its relation to central banking. • An overview of the university education of elites worldwide. • A study of the elite education of all the board members in a hundred years since the foundation of the Banco de la República, the Colombian central bank. • An investigation into why central banks assume the public role of culture promotion.Publication Stress and Racial Health Disparities in Multiracial Families: Understanding the Link between Family Support and Stress(2024-09)Multiracial families have increased dramatically in the U.S.: rising from approximately one percent of the population in 1970 (approximately 470,000 individuals; U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1972) to 19 percent in 2022 (a little over 11.5 million couples; Hernandez & Hemez, 2023); these rates are projected to triple by 2060 (Bialik, 2017). The term “multiracial” refers to couples from different racial backgrounds (e.g., White-Black). Research indicates that multiracial couples face more stress and family conflict than their monoracial (i.e., same race) counterparts, resulting in increased rates of separation and divorce. To date, little research addresses the determinants of stress that may lead to relational distress for multiracial parents, although it is likely that a key challenge is the stress of merging two different racial backgrounds. The early years of parenthood are a time in which multiracial couples may experience heightened stress because they must merge the values, behaviors, and beliefs of two unique racial groups into one family system. Family support may serve as a key resilience factor during this time, buffering the stress of new parenthood on marital and coparenting conflict, and supporting positive adjustment to stress. The current study employed a sequential explanatory mixed methods design to 1) examine the relationship between racial composition of parent dyads and stress, including the role of family support in mediating and/or moderating that relationship and 2) utilize qualitative interviews to better understand the quantitative results regarding the factors that contribute to the transmission of stress in multiracial couples. Our findings demonstrated that parents in multiracial families experience disparate levels and types of stress compared to parents in monoracial families, and that family support may function as a stressor as well as a stress reliever for multiracial families playing a unique role in their experience of stress. Specifically, a novel finding in this study supported by the quantitative and qualitative results was the unique contribution of financial family support as a source of stress for multiracial families. Future research should continue examining the unique dynamics of family support for multiracial families and its role in their stress.Publication Fearless Girls and Winning Women: The Politics of Inclusion in Finance after 2008(2024-09)What role can gender diversity and women’s inclusion play in the inequities produced through the global economy? In the period following financial crisis, from 2008-2020, a gender diversity agenda (GDA) proliferated in global financial centers as part of both regulatory reforms and voluntary industry-led efforts to restore legitimacy to the financial sector. This dissertation uses ethnographic and interview methods along with document analysis to examine these initiatives as paradigmatic sites for understanding ongoing contestations over the inclusivity of financialized societies more broadly. What does it mean to work towards gender equality in an industry that generates extreme socio-economic inequality and subjects us all to extractive dynamics? In Chapter 2, I describe how the GDA emerged through the public, private and nonprofit institutions of finance as part of the regulatory response to financial crisis. This was not only a story of feminist success or feminist co-optation, but also reflected transnational economistic discourse about girls and women that had emerged earlier within international development, as I discuss in Chapter 3. I then take a close-up look at some of the gender diversity programs in operation, showing in an ethnographic case study in Chapter 4 that gender diversity candidates are made through GDA initiatives themselves, not found pre-existing and funneled through a pipeline, as the popular metaphor represents. Gender diversity programs serve as an initiation into finance wherein young women have to navigate contradictory expectations that involve overcoming gender, while at the same time producing value via essentialized gender traits. In Chapter 5, I consider the stakes that gender diversity candidates themselves have in debates over whether diversity efforts amount to co-optation, demonstrating how their perceptions shape the everyday politics of diversity in finance. The final chapter attends to the meanings made of gender and finance through diversity programs, zooming out to theorize about the extractive logics that govern both, yet are covered up by narratives of beneficent intermediation.
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