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This dissertation is an ethnography conducted with the Los Angeles-based community arts organization called Machine Project. Operating both a storefront gallery in Echo Park and as a loose association of contemporary artists, performers, curators, and designers, Machine Project seeks to make "rarefied knowledge accessible" through workshops, site-specific installations and performances, lectures, and various participatory projects. Machine Project exists as but one instantiation of a larger movement in contemporary art around "alternative spaces," or organizations and projects that resist and/or refigure the discursive structures imposed on art by institutions of cultural heritage and the art market. Alternative and artist-run spaces often operate with a Do-It-Yourself and independent ethos, and are often sustained by its communities of artists and the publics that support them. Many of the efforts of alternative spaces are process-based operations, whether as an exhibition space for experimental forms of contemporary art, forums and workshops on a range of topics, performances, participatory projects, among others. Records created about the events, programs, and operations of these alternative spaces are often elusive, if created at all. Historically, alternative and artist-run spaces have been invested in community building, the public circulation of aesthetic knowledge, the exposing of museums and other institutions of cultural heritage as discursive frames, and public participation. How does documentation serve to support such orientations? If an alternative or artist-run space describes its operations in terms of values like community participation and relational aesthetics, how might such values be folded into the production, circulation, and preservation of its records?This dissertation is comprised of two primary sections. The first section includes a critical review of the archival science literature, identifying fundamental concepts of archival theory and practice that are directly relevant to the research questions, such as the principle of provenance, evidence, and records creation. This section also includes a chapter devoted to describing and assessing ethnography as a methodological approach for archival research, drawing in insights culled from social systems theory and information theory.The second section of the dissertation is comprised of observations and reflections on Machine Project and its documentation practices at three levels of analysis. The first level explores documentation issues that emerge out of the organization's collaborations with arts institutions. The second level adopts a finer-grained view and looks at collaborative relationships between artists affiliated with Machine Project. The third level looks to notions of community as they are expressed in a selection of Machine Project's events and programs, and analyzes the documentation produced by audiences and shared in social media spaces. The dissertation concludes with reading of Machine Project's documentation practices through the theoretical lens of the records continuum, which forms the basis for a critique of the records continuum and the burgeoning area of research on community archiving. Following this critique, the dissertation then presents a series of recommendations for future research and describes the metaphorical figure of the "itinerant archivist" as a conceptual intervention and strategy for self-reflection among archival scholars and practitioners.

Memorials and the Cult of Apology examines how contemporary memorials have come to embody more than memory. It begins with a simple observation of the growing demand for apologies across the globe and the related proliferation of memorials that aim to atone for past injustices. In effect, apologies are being materialized into memorials, a phenomenon of global importance, which presents a major shift in national self-representation. In the broadest terms, my research is an intervention into the cultural history of the built environment. As the first scholarly work to address memorials as apologies, my dissertation builds an empirical and theoretical understanding of multiple aspects of apology and memorialization, of their material forms, the actors involved, and the diverse effects built apologies produce. It uses five representative case studies located in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco, to develop this argument. Since memorialization is an inherently interdisciplinary topic, my work incorporates methods, readings, and theories from a vast array of humanistic disciplines, particularly postcolonial theory, Holocaust and human rights scholarship, and debates about justice, recognition, reparation, and morality. My archival and field research combines methods drawn from architectural history and the humanities ¬–close reading, literary interpretation, and storytelling–, which I apply to the formal analysis of built memorials and their urban contexts. This formal analysis is complemented with ethnographic interviews with designers, experts and site visitors, as well as participant observation of both commemorative events and what has been called ‘apology activism.’

Text classification plays a fundamental role in transforming unstructured text data to structured knowledge. State-of-the-art text classification techniques rely on heavy domain-specific annotations to build massive machine(deep) learning models. Although these deep learning models exhibit superior performance, the lack of training data and expensive human effort in the manual annotation is a key bottleneck that forbids them from being adopted in many practical scenarios. To address this bottleneck, our research exploits the data and develops a family of data-driven text classification frameworks with minimal supervision, for e.g. class names, a few label-indicative seed words per class.The massive volume of text data and complexity of natural language pose significant challenges to categorizing the text corpus without human annotations. For instance, the user- provided seed words can have multiple interpretations depending on the context, and their respective user-intended interpretation has to be identified for accurate classification. Moreover, metadata information like author, year, and location is widely available in addition to the text data, and it could serve as a strong, complementary source of supervision. However, leveraging metadata is challenging because (1) metadata is multi-typed, therefore it requires systematic modeling of different types and their combinations, (2) metadata is noisy, some metadata entities (e.g., authors, venues) are more compelling label indicators than others. And also, the label set is typically assumed to be fixed in traditional text classification problems. However, in many real-world applications, new classes especially more fine-grained ones will be introduced as the data volume increases. The goal of our research is to create general data-driven methods that transform real-world text data into structured categories of human knowledge with minimal human effort.This thesis outlines a family of weakly supervised text classification approaches, which upon combining can automatically categorize huge text corpus into coarse and fine-grained classes, with just label hierarchy and a few label-indicative seed words as supervision. Specifically, it first leverages contextualized representations of word occurrences and seed word information to automatically differentiate multiple interpretations of a seed word, and thus result- ing in contextualized weak supervision. Then, to leverage metadata, it organizes the text data and metadata together into a text-rich network and adopt network motifs to capture appropriate combinations of metadata. Finally, we introduce a new problem called coarse-to-fine grained classification, which aims to perform fine-grained classification on coarsely annotated data. Instead of asking for new fine-grained human annotations, we opt to leverage label surface names as the only human guidance and weave in rich pre-trained generative language models into the iterative weak supervision strategy. We have performed extensive experiments on real-world datasets from different domains. The results demonstrate significant advantages of using contextualized weak supervision and leveraging metadata, and superior performance over baselines.

This dissertation examines how the Centralverein deutscher Staatsb�rger j�dischen Glaubens and the Volksverein f�r das katholische Deutschland utilized decentralization into the local and regional spheres to participate in German society, shape public and political discourse, and strengthen their respective community’s sense of belonging and identity. Drawing on the Centralverein and Volksverein’s administrative records held in archives in England and Germany, this dissertation assesses how their networks of local and regional branches operated and how power and responsibility shifted between the center and the periphery during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany. In decentering away from their respective central office to focus on the local and regional branches, this dissertation argues that local and regional branches were the main sites in which religious minority groups constructed and reinforced their influence, whether political or social. Whether through providing legal or political defense or holding assemblies and lectures, religious minority associations worked to unite their members and create a unified front for political and social action on their own behalf. In promoting a positive connection to Jewishness while also defending Germanness, the Centralverein’s local and regional branches created tailored spaces in which Centralverein members could develop and affirm a synthesized German-Jewish identity while also asserting their civic belonging in the local, regional, and national spheres. Through both a comparative and integrated institutional history of the Centralverein and Volksverein’s decentralization, this dissertation provides a more detailed understanding of social and political relations between minority and majority communities during the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, and Nazi Germany. A comparative perspective allows for examining how minority religious associations responded and adapted to changes at the state level and navigated shifting means of self-assertion and political expression. In examining how German-Jewish and German-Catholic associations implemented decentralization and accommodated regionalization, this study decenters the examination of belonging, the pluralities of civic, regional, and religious identities and what it meant to represent religious minority interests in the German public sphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Out of Place serves as a record for the last three years of my practice, tracing the ideas that informed my work, braiding together the strands of conflicting ideas and research on the Salton Sea, plastic waste, dust, and how we are tethered to invisible labor and wastescapes. This paper is a patchwork, a quilt of my weavings with personal narratives, drawing upon Discard studies, Asian American studies, Indigenous studies, autotheory, and artists across disciplines to resituate my Asian American identity. This paper follows the trail of waste and debris, re-routed and re-formed, expressing the entanglement of our lives with non-human beings and the environment.

My dissertation investigates questions of violence and alterity in texts by J. M. G. Le Clézio, Natacha Appanah, Ananda Devi, Khal Torabully, and Véronique Tadjo. By bringing together francophone postcolonial studies and genocide studies, I create new conversations that can foster a better look at transnational literature and history. I compare traditional historiography and contemporary fiction, and analyze literary techniques, such as voice, character, and perspective, to demonstrate how authors transcend boundaries to create collective memories of violent events. The first chapter compares and contrasts portrayals of genocide and historical violence in Le Clézio's Révolutions. I focus on the interweaving of past and present in the novel to argue that ultimately Le Clézio falls shorts of creating a genuinely multidirectional space, even as he does give voice to the historically marginalized. In the second chapter, I move to cases of "nongenocide" to allow for a broader discussion of violations of human rights in two of Appanah's novels: in Les Rochers de Poudre d'Or I focus is on gender issues and "coolies," the indentured laborers bound for Mauritius, and in Le dernier frère, I discuss the little-known history of a group of Central European Jews who were kept in an old colonial "camp" in Mauritius during World War II. I analyze Appanah's treatment of such violent histories in conjunction with the concept of "nongenocide" (Meierheinrich 2011), and I conclude that Appanah creates multidirectional (Rothberg 2009) conversations about historiography and race to foreground traumas hidden from collective memory. The question of narrative point of view with regards to victimhood and representation drives my interrogation of the two texts that I study in the third chapter. Torabully's Mes Afriques, mes ivoires and Tadjo's L'ombre d'Imana, are responses to genocide in Rwanda that reveal the authors' anxieties about the civil war in Côte d'Ivoire and its risks of descending into genocide. In all the chapters of this thesis, I examine how authors represent different forms of historical violence so as to answer a central question: what are the literary tools these authors mobilize in order to create empathy and community among different groups as well as between author and reader(s).

Beginning in 2000, Harun Farocki’s work and writing theorized the operational image, an image produced as part of an operation, rather than for educational, aesthetic or rhetorical ends. My thesis uses the concept’s antecedent in Roland Barthes’ influential Mythologies to consider how Farocki’s approach differs from other methods of politically inflected analysis of culture and representation. I argue that Farocki’s work differs in its emphasis of mediating connections as a constitutive aspect of reality, rather than an obstacle to such. I develop this argument through a reading of Farocki’s accounts of film and video editing, which emphasize both his working processes and the autonomy of his subjects and materials. I discuss how Farocki’s method of “soft montage” allows for critical commentary while preserving his materials’ independence.

Philippe de Champaigne (1602-1674) is mostly remembered for his triple portrait of Richelieu and his hieratic series of Jansenist leaders' portraits but rarely considered for his rapport with nature despite his training as a Flemish landscape artist. By introducing the unexpected question of the natural in the context of his artistic practice, I reconsider Champaigne's rich corpus of portraits, which map his contemporary society and provide a new perspective on the evolving web of social identities.I explore how the concept of the natural, as opposed to artifice, is a shifting term that questions the ability of the painter to imitate nature, create a prototype, and give it "life." I successively qualify Champaigne's artistic praxis in relation to its contemporary reception within different communities – the nobility, the Crown, the Jansenist community, and finally the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Champaigne's approach to portraiture raises the issues of exemplarity, resemblance, and presence of the model. These three problematics offer a chronological and thematic understanding of the painter as a multifaceted artist who leads portraiture into different paths – decoration, diplomacy, and even the sacred.The position of the portraitist within the complex social and political agenda of the French Grand siècle, provides a particularly interesting and underexamined insight into the intricate relations between power and religion under Louis XIII's reign and later, during the Regency's social unrest. By combining formal analysis with anthropologically rich archival evidence, I consider Champaigne's portraits as active agents in history, thus providing a conceptual framework to analyze the different actors' strategies of representation.

This dissertation examines the use of human remains as tools for research and display over the course of a fifty-year span in the United States. It explores the shift away from racial classification toward emerging ideas regarding human prehistory and evolution. This project serves as both an intellectual history of the discourse surrounding these remains and a cultural history of the exhibitions that millions of visitors encountered at museums and fairs throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Come, Fur(r)es, Dance! is a devised, hybrid lecture-performance performed on the 26th, 27th, and 28th of May 2023, in UCSC’s eXperimental Theater. It is the final iteration in a series of performative experiments I used to better understand the ways experiences of masculinity are navigated, manipulated, and remade in communities within social VR (virtual reality). Created with the help of three devising artists, a team of student designers, a technical crew, and the larger UCSC arts community, Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance! uses puppetry, dance, live interviews, and storytelling performed across virtual- and meat-space. The work focuses on the legacy of military development in the embodied experience of VR users, the desires that traverse the gap between users' identity presentations in and out of VR, and directly engages with a Waifu-themed MilSim community that calls themselves the British Armed Forces. To facilitate the rehearsals and performance of Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance!, I developed a distributed signal management system for a flexible, mediated stage ecology. This thesis situates the performance within the social, artistic, and personal context from which Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance! arose and reflects on the insights and challenges from throughout its making. First, I explore the discoveries unearthed by the performance surrounding virtual masculinities and the drives behind certain social formations in VR. Then, I discuss my strategy of critique within the structure and aesthetic logic of Come, Fur(r)ies, Dance!. After, I reflect on the rehearsal practices that created the performance, outline two technical innovations that made it possible, and situate the performance within an artistic field engaged with related concerns. Finally, I connect this work to my personal history. The end of the thesis includes an archival script from the first performance and a separate reflection on technical challenges.